By attending to race and gender as archives of disprivileged experiential knowledge that lie within and beyond the dermis, Margaret Mascarenhas's novel Skin questions the bounded geographic limits of racialized histories. Skin enmeshes its participants within designs of native and colonial power, wherein violence and displacement are evidenced as pervasive elements of modernity's onset. Furthermore, because of its inclusion of Africans who are dislocated to Goa, Skin allows for a consideration of Asian and black subjectivities under the influence of Portuguese colonization, moving away from the primacy of British colonialism in postcolonial epistemologies. Skin brings attention to one of the world's longest colonial histories and a history of African slavery outside of the Atlantic by incorporating the arena of the Indian Ocean as part of that trade. Within this, gendered legacies of racialization are proven to be more than skin deep in accounting for resistance and survival.
In November 2020, Indian celebrity Milind Soman posted a picture of himself on social media, which showed him running naked on a beach. He was charged with obscenity. This article considers the time and place of Soman’s act over the alleged impropriety. The photograph was taken on a beach in Goa, the tropical setting serving as a pleasure periphery to India which annexed the region in 1961. Accordingly, a longer history of states of undress in Indian advertising, filmmaking, and tourism are considered here to apprehend how Goa has been posited in the Indian imagination as a destination for wanton self-gratification while local realities are undermined. The article thus interrogates what it means for Goa, whose economy is overly dependent on tourism, to serve as a vacation spot during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially when, in 2020, it had among the highest number of virus-related deaths in the country (Dias, 2020, par. 4). Using the metaphor of the celebrity who has no qualms about running naked and unmasked in Goa, this article enquires into what such events leave unrevealed in the economic requirement that some locales function as holiday destinations, even in the midst of a pandemic.
‘Gay Globalization via Goa in My Brother… Nikhil’ examines the 2005 film, which was the first to have focused on homosexuality in India. Despite this claim, the film articulates gay subjectivity as emerging from a global, rights-based perspective, it is argued. Central to this analysis of the film is its setting in Goa which is employed as a site of liminality between ‘traditional’ India and global modernity. Goa is both cleaved to and from India as a whole by casting the former’s historical regionality through a misconstrual of its religious identities, as well as through references to colonial and alleged racial difference. The film’s basis for such differentiation is considered as being in large part due to Goa’s longer colonization by the Portuguese in comparison to the reign of the British in most of the rest of India. Modernity and diaspora are also explored as key features of the representation of Goa in the film, especially as they tie in to issues of gay rights. Further, the essay scrutinizes the parallels between the title character and the real-life inspiration behind the film, the Goan AIDS activist Dominic D’souza. In concluding, it is made apparent that the film centres gay male subjectivity while relegating Goan identity to an ambivalent marginality.
Dubai, not India, is the location of the world’s only Bollywood theme park. Fantasy and violence jump from screen to simulated life at Bollywood Parks Dubai (BPD), allowing for the consumption of film and associated entertainment to occur trans-medially and transnationally. Accordingly, this essay delves into representations of culture and violence, through filmic imaginaries, that link South Asia and the Arabian Gulf. Using Bollywood/film studies alongside area and postcolonial studies and architectural history, I consider how theme parks work as manifestations of the fantastic, suturing cultural entertainment and racialized violence by proxy in a built space. In this, BPD is a site of culturally co-optive consumption and mediation between the orientalist, or re-orientalized, differences of Asian subjects to the exclusion of the occident(als). Focusing on its patrons and its film-based rides, and through research in the digital humanities, such as studies of first-person shooter games, I demonstrate how BPD serves as a mediascape that thrives on the reorientalized fantasy of Indian cinema. BPD thus provides a simulacral space in which patrons may vicariously test the limits (and possibilities) of South Asian-Middle Eastern multiculturalism, as well as Indian caste mores, against the backdrop of neoliberal globalization.
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