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Community, Memory, and Migration in a Globalizing World: The Goan Experience, c. 1890–1980
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 51 (2016) 103e114
source critique would have been welcome: parts of John Wood's town plan maps did not always easily distinguish between intended and actually-built parts of the urban fabric; many of the photographs used date from the 1950s and 1960sdhave all the Georgian buildings and interiors depicted survived the ravages of later town planning? Because the book examines such a wealth of evidence for thirty towns, it is, at moments, hard to discern what might be called a single national narrative or, at least, a national narrative that is anything more than an insistence upon the experience of individual towns or the difficulty of identifying a firm chronology: individuality of experience within a general culture of improvement may, indeed, be the national narrative. In general, however, the renaissance enjoyed by Scotland's towns and the majority of her town-dwelling citizens in this period was due to political will, economic opportunity, the rejection of the past and a confidence rooted in an ethic of order, civility, and utility. In nearly every instance, these were matters rooted in local civic pride and in shared recognition of the need for change much more than they were either a consequence of national identity or because they felt partda Hanoverian North partdof Great Britain. Charles W.J. Withers University of Edinburgh, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2015.05.015
Margret Frenz, Community, Memory, and Migration in a Globalizing World: The Goan Experience, c. 1890e1980. New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2014, xxxiii þ 344 pages, INR995 hardcover. Margret Frenz has produced the first comprehensive book on what she calls ‘Global Goans’. It is an impressive account and a fine piece of scholarship. It is also a serious contribution to multiple overlapping fields: history, anthropology, sociology, Lusophone studies (and within this wider umbrella, Indo-Portuguese or Goan studies), South Asian diaspora studies, East African studies, and Indian Ocean scholarship. Her focus is very much an understudied and under-researched topic precisely because of the ‘in-betweenness’ (p. 2) of Goans within global history. Their ‘in-betweenness’, she writes, ‘took several formsdin-between the Portuguese and the British (and sometimes the German) Empires; in-between Africans and Europeans; in-between Africa and Asia’ (p. 2). This book is astonishing in its depth and breadth for it is the culmination of approximately ten years of archival and ethnographic research in multiple locations: Goa, Portugal, India, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Frenz carried out an outstanding 220 interviews (with 290 interviewees in total, half female, half male) in these various locations. She met Goans in their homes, shared food with them, recorded life stories, and culled (sometimes painful) memories. The book showcases the benefits of ‘multi-sited research’ (p. 13). What makes this book so accessible and informative is that the author successfully combines, and manages a fine balance between, documentary sources and oral ones in order to write about the larger social, economic, and political processes that Goans were caught up in their movements between Portuguese India and (British) East Africa in the period between 1890 and 1980. It is in this way that ‘migration, community, and memory are intertwined’ (p. 24) and that the book succeeds as a form of writing ‘connected history’done that is a ‘history of connections that link empires and continents, and a history that connects people's own voices with the changing political, social, and economic contexts within which those lives are lived’ (p. 3). Frenz also importantly distinguishes
109
between different patterns of migration to different locations in (British) East AfricadZanzibar, Tanganyika, Kenya, and Uganda being the countries of focus. Here we get glimpses of the diasporic lives of a Goan photographer in Stone Town (Zanzibar), a Goan school teacher in Nairobi (Kenya), and a Goan tailor in Kampala (Uganda), to name just a few of the professions that Goans were active participants in throughout this time frame. Frenz continues her diasporic storytelling by looking at how the Goan descendants of that same photographer, teacher, or tailor might have then decided to move to Canada, the US, or UK during a later period (post 1960s). The author's decision to focus on the social institutions of the club, the church, and the school as sites for Goan community building works well, both as an organizing principle and as entry port into the production of specific ‘Zanzibari Goan, Tanganyikan Goan, Ugandan Goan, and Kenyan Goan spaces’ (p. 135). Lastly, Frenz cleverly divides the chapters between different aspects of Goan diasporic being: ‘Crossing the Ocean’, ‘Making a Living’, ‘Creating a Community’, ‘Engaging in Politics’, ‘Moving On? Making New Lives’, and ‘Remembering East Africa’. The use of the active verb form in these chapter titles is telling of the agency given to these individual Goans who, as mostly voluntary migrants, moved in the hopes of carving out better lives elsewhere. Frenz's remarkable study is a much-needed book that fills in a longstanding gap on those diasporic movements that do not fit within neat stories of colony-metropole migrations. On the one hand, her work very much builds on Thomas Metcalf's important and innovative Imperial Connections (2007)da book that looked at South Asians moving between British India and British East Africa (between 1860 and 1920) as a form of imperial citizenship in-the-making. On the other, Frenz takes one step further (and thus both expands upon and contributes to this burgeoning area of scholarship) by taking seriously the nature of intercolonial or transimperial migrations (as opposed to intracolonial, which is the focus of Metcalf's study) with her exclusive focus on Goans moving between Portuguese India and British East Africa. Left out of this story, perhaps, is the experience of Goans moving between Portuguese India and Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) where yet a very different form of imperial citizenship took place (and which could provide an interesting comparative lens onto the British East Africa experience), but, to be fair in my assessment, that was never considered part of the author's area of focus. Thus, not only are the Goans more generally understood as operating at the margins of nation states, experienced, perhaps most acutely, in the throes of decolonization (in India in particular, but also within various East African countries), but they have consistently been an ‘unduly overlooked group’ (p. 3) within academic scholarship. Frenz starts to tell the important story of those marginalized diasporas, for which there are many other unfinished stories to be told, and ones (like the Parsi, who lived side-by-side with Goans in Zanzibar) that require this kind of detailed study. For scholars working on any aspect of Goan culture and society (both in Goa itself and within its many diasporic locations), this book is incredibly usefuldit serves almost as a manual of sorts for all things Goan. As a scholar myself working on various topics related to Goa, I learned so much about Goan-ness, both in the rich oral testimonies and detailed archival sources that were included. The reader will get a real sense of a range of diasporic experiences such that the Goan identity is not one that can be fixed in time or space. In addition, for those scholars interested in researching specific Goan communities in East Africa, this book provides an excellent set of source materials for further reading and follow-up. I would argue that the survey quality of Frenz's book is both its greatest weakness and strength. By taking on such a large and expansive topic as Goan movements over a hundred year period,
110
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 51 (2016) 103e114
and to so many locations across the globe, there is only so much space left for the individual life stories of these global Goans on the move and in relation to specific once, twice, and thrice migrations. No doubt she would have a produced a very different kind of book had she focused more exclusively on the Goan Tanganyikan diasporic community for example. At the same time, it is the author's ability to conceive of and sketch a uniquely Goan worldly landscape over time and space that makes this an invaluable study, and also an enduring one. Pamila Gupta University of Witwatersrand, South Africa http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2015.04.023
Michael Osborne, The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2014, 328 pages, US$50 hardcover. With this fascinating book, Michael Osborne makes a significant contribution to the literatures of the history of medicine, military and colonial history and French history by decentering our focus in important ways. Commanding material from at least 13 different archives and libraries in France, Osborne shows that the peripheries of French coastal cities utilized by the navy were crucial to the development of ‘tropical’ medicine in France long before Paris became a center of its research, treatment and teaching in the early twentieth century. That is, he argues that colonial medicine in France primarily began as naval medicine in what were considered relatively unimportant coastal ports. Furthermore, he provides richly detailed material which demonstrates that the French made critical contributions to tropical, colonial medicine, expanding our previously Anglocentric understandings of this field in substantial ways. In six concise chapters, an introduction and conclusion, Osborne provides an overview that spans the seventeenth to the twentyfirst centuries with the most intense focus on the long nineteenth century. Following a useful introduction, the first chapter sets the stage with a detailed overview of the navy, its healers, and its regulations from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century. Chapter two analyzes medical geography and hygiene as practiced by the navy healers and makes clear the distinctness of navy medicine from both army and civilian medicine in nineteenth century France. This is all the more interesting given that ‘naval medical schools [built using prison labor] could not confer medical degrees’ (p. 3). Another important distinction between the naval medical approach and that in Paris at the time, Osborne suggests in chapter 3, was the less reductive and deterministic approach to race and ethnicity of many navy healers. The port cities of most importance to naval, colonial medicine through the close of the nineteenth century included Brest, Toulon, Rochefort, Cherbourg and Lorient. Reforms in both the navy and colonial administration during the late nineteenth century, however, led to the center of colonial medical education and research moving from these ports (and ships) to the more commercial coastal cities of Bordeaux and Marseille, and also to Paris in the early twentieth century. Osborne details this change and the rise of Bordeaux and then Marseille as centers of colonial medicine respectively in chapters four and five. From this point, the book describes the trajectory of the slow decline of the navy as the center of the development of colonial medicine. In Bordeaux, this included, among other things, the
establishment of the Colonial Institute in 1901 and a new medical faculty a dozen years earlier, although it remained a stronghold of navy medicine into the twentieth century. In Marseille it included the city's long-standing fascination and activities with French colonialism, its established medical facilities and educational infra structure, as well as the founding of the Ecole d'application for colonial physicians in 1905. The final substantial chapter, chapter 6, examines the establishment of Paris as a key center of civilian colonial and tropical medicine by the early twentieth century. Especially influential were the establishment of the Institute of Colonial Medicine within the Paris Faculty of Medicine in 1902 and the energetic activities of professor Raphael Blanchard, medical parasitologist. By 1930, the centenary of the invasion of Algiers, colonial medicine in France was firmly ensconced in Paris, Marseille and Bordeaux and it had been transformed from a primarily naval enterprise to one firmly anchored in civilian and army medicine. In the conclusion, Osborne laments the final passing of the navy's influence in 2011 when ‘the navy's long battle of resistance to a full institutional incorporation into army medicine had ended’ with the closure of Toulon's Institute of Naval Medicine (p. 221). He also makes clear here that the navy had a lingering influence on colonial medicine in France up to this time, albeit in a less significant way than the centers in Paris, Marseille and Bordeaux. This book will appeal widely to historians: French historians, medical historians, military historians and colonial historians who will find it immensely useful. It will also appeal to some historical geographers as well as medical geographers interested in the history of their subfield. It has a lot to offer studies of medical geography from an historical perspective. Geographers in general, however, may find the discussions of place and regional geography a bit perfunctory and will likely wish for more maps of higher quality than the single, simple map provided on p. 12. The book is illustrated further with seven images taken from a variety of media relevant to the subject. For anyone interested in the history of medicine, the history of colonialism, military or French history, this book provides an essential and unique analysis that will influence scholarship for many years to come. Diana K. Davis University of California at Davis, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2015.05.007
Christine Shepardson, Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2014, 312 pages, US$95 hardcover. Antioch, located on the Orontes River and known today as Antakya, the present capital of the Hatay province of Turkey, was during the period of the fourth and fifth century AD one of the Late Roman Empire's premier cities. Although little remains of the late antique urban fabric other than part of the city walls, a few significantly modified monuments, and the limited discoveries of archaeological excavations from the 1930s, the textual sources paint a vivid picture of life in the city both in terms of its political importance as an imperial capital and as a center in the development of early Christianity during the last centuries of paganism. Based on the availability of written sources from the fourth and fifth century, a significant corpus of scholarship has been produced about the city's history, its pagan orators and Christian religious leaders, and the city's role as a battleground for the often violent
source critique would have been welcome: parts of John Wood's town plan maps did not always easily distinguish between intended and actually-built parts of the urban fabric; many of the photographs used date from the 1950s and 1960sdhave all the Georgian buildings and interiors depicted survived the ravages of later town planning? Because the book examines such a wealth of evidence for thirty towns, it is, at moments, hard to discern what might be called a single national narrative or, at least, a national narrative that is anything more than an insistence upon the experience of individual towns or the difficulty of identifying a firm chronology: individuality of experience within a general culture of improvement may, indeed, be the national narrative. In general, however, the renaissance enjoyed by Scotland's towns and the majority of her town-dwelling citizens in this period was due to political will, economic opportunity, the rejection of the past and a confidence rooted in an ethic of order, civility, and utility. In nearly every instance, these were matters rooted in local civic pride and in shared recognition of the need for change much more than they were either a consequence of national identity or because they felt partda Hanoverian North partdof Great Britain. Charles W.J. Withers University of Edinburgh, UK http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2015.05.015
Margret Frenz, Community, Memory, and Migration in a Globalizing World: The Goan Experience, c. 1890e1980. New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2014, xxxiii þ 344 pages, INR995 hardcover. Margret Frenz has produced the first comprehensive book on what she calls ‘Global Goans’. It is an impressive account and a fine piece of scholarship. It is also a serious contribution to multiple overlapping fields: history, anthropology, sociology, Lusophone studies (and within this wider umbrella, Indo-Portuguese or Goan studies), South Asian diaspora studies, East African studies, and Indian Ocean scholarship. Her focus is very much an understudied and under-researched topic precisely because of the ‘in-betweenness’ (p. 2) of Goans within global history. Their ‘in-betweenness’, she writes, ‘took several formsdin-between the Portuguese and the British (and sometimes the German) Empires; in-between Africans and Europeans; in-between Africa and Asia’ (p. 2). This book is astonishing in its depth and breadth for it is the culmination of approximately ten years of archival and ethnographic research in multiple locations: Goa, Portugal, India, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Frenz carried out an outstanding 220 interviews (with 290 interviewees in total, half female, half male) in these various locations. She met Goans in their homes, shared food with them, recorded life stories, and culled (sometimes painful) memories. The book showcases the benefits of ‘multi-sited research’ (p. 13). What makes this book so accessible and informative is that the author successfully combines, and manages a fine balance between, documentary sources and oral ones in order to write about the larger social, economic, and political processes that Goans were caught up in their movements between Portuguese India and (British) East Africa in the period between 1890 and 1980. It is in this way that ‘migration, community, and memory are intertwined’ (p. 24) and that the book succeeds as a form of writing ‘connected history’done that is a ‘history of connections that link empires and continents, and a history that connects people's own voices with the changing political, social, and economic contexts within which those lives are lived’ (p. 3). Frenz also importantly distinguishes
109
between different patterns of migration to different locations in (British) East AfricadZanzibar, Tanganyika, Kenya, and Uganda being the countries of focus. Here we get glimpses of the diasporic lives of a Goan photographer in Stone Town (Zanzibar), a Goan school teacher in Nairobi (Kenya), and a Goan tailor in Kampala (Uganda), to name just a few of the professions that Goans were active participants in throughout this time frame. Frenz continues her diasporic storytelling by looking at how the Goan descendants of that same photographer, teacher, or tailor might have then decided to move to Canada, the US, or UK during a later period (post 1960s). The author's decision to focus on the social institutions of the club, the church, and the school as sites for Goan community building works well, both as an organizing principle and as entry port into the production of specific ‘Zanzibari Goan, Tanganyikan Goan, Ugandan Goan, and Kenyan Goan spaces’ (p. 135). Lastly, Frenz cleverly divides the chapters between different aspects of Goan diasporic being: ‘Crossing the Ocean’, ‘Making a Living’, ‘Creating a Community’, ‘Engaging in Politics’, ‘Moving On? Making New Lives’, and ‘Remembering East Africa’. The use of the active verb form in these chapter titles is telling of the agency given to these individual Goans who, as mostly voluntary migrants, moved in the hopes of carving out better lives elsewhere. Frenz's remarkable study is a much-needed book that fills in a longstanding gap on those diasporic movements that do not fit within neat stories of colony-metropole migrations. On the one hand, her work very much builds on Thomas Metcalf's important and innovative Imperial Connections (2007)da book that looked at South Asians moving between British India and British East Africa (between 1860 and 1920) as a form of imperial citizenship in-the-making. On the other, Frenz takes one step further (and thus both expands upon and contributes to this burgeoning area of scholarship) by taking seriously the nature of intercolonial or transimperial migrations (as opposed to intracolonial, which is the focus of Metcalf's study) with her exclusive focus on Goans moving between Portuguese India and British East Africa. Left out of this story, perhaps, is the experience of Goans moving between Portuguese India and Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) where yet a very different form of imperial citizenship took place (and which could provide an interesting comparative lens onto the British East Africa experience), but, to be fair in my assessment, that was never considered part of the author's area of focus. Thus, not only are the Goans more generally understood as operating at the margins of nation states, experienced, perhaps most acutely, in the throes of decolonization (in India in particular, but also within various East African countries), but they have consistently been an ‘unduly overlooked group’ (p. 3) within academic scholarship. Frenz starts to tell the important story of those marginalized diasporas, for which there are many other unfinished stories to be told, and ones (like the Parsi, who lived side-by-side with Goans in Zanzibar) that require this kind of detailed study. For scholars working on any aspect of Goan culture and society (both in Goa itself and within its many diasporic locations), this book is incredibly usefuldit serves almost as a manual of sorts for all things Goan. As a scholar myself working on various topics related to Goa, I learned so much about Goan-ness, both in the rich oral testimonies and detailed archival sources that were included. The reader will get a real sense of a range of diasporic experiences such that the Goan identity is not one that can be fixed in time or space. In addition, for those scholars interested in researching specific Goan communities in East Africa, this book provides an excellent set of source materials for further reading and follow-up. I would argue that the survey quality of Frenz's book is both its greatest weakness and strength. By taking on such a large and expansive topic as Goan movements over a hundred year period,
110
Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 51 (2016) 103e114
and to so many locations across the globe, there is only so much space left for the individual life stories of these global Goans on the move and in relation to specific once, twice, and thrice migrations. No doubt she would have a produced a very different kind of book had she focused more exclusively on the Goan Tanganyikan diasporic community for example. At the same time, it is the author's ability to conceive of and sketch a uniquely Goan worldly landscape over time and space that makes this an invaluable study, and also an enduring one. Pamila Gupta University of Witwatersrand, South Africa http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2015.04.023
Michael Osborne, The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2014, 328 pages, US$50 hardcover. With this fascinating book, Michael Osborne makes a significant contribution to the literatures of the history of medicine, military and colonial history and French history by decentering our focus in important ways. Commanding material from at least 13 different archives and libraries in France, Osborne shows that the peripheries of French coastal cities utilized by the navy were crucial to the development of ‘tropical’ medicine in France long before Paris became a center of its research, treatment and teaching in the early twentieth century. That is, he argues that colonial medicine in France primarily began as naval medicine in what were considered relatively unimportant coastal ports. Furthermore, he provides richly detailed material which demonstrates that the French made critical contributions to tropical, colonial medicine, expanding our previously Anglocentric understandings of this field in substantial ways. In six concise chapters, an introduction and conclusion, Osborne provides an overview that spans the seventeenth to the twentyfirst centuries with the most intense focus on the long nineteenth century. Following a useful introduction, the first chapter sets the stage with a detailed overview of the navy, its healers, and its regulations from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century. Chapter two analyzes medical geography and hygiene as practiced by the navy healers and makes clear the distinctness of navy medicine from both army and civilian medicine in nineteenth century France. This is all the more interesting given that ‘naval medical schools [built using prison labor] could not confer medical degrees’ (p. 3). Another important distinction between the naval medical approach and that in Paris at the time, Osborne suggests in chapter 3, was the less reductive and deterministic approach to race and ethnicity of many navy healers. The port cities of most importance to naval, colonial medicine through the close of the nineteenth century included Brest, Toulon, Rochefort, Cherbourg and Lorient. Reforms in both the navy and colonial administration during the late nineteenth century, however, led to the center of colonial medical education and research moving from these ports (and ships) to the more commercial coastal cities of Bordeaux and Marseille, and also to Paris in the early twentieth century. Osborne details this change and the rise of Bordeaux and then Marseille as centers of colonial medicine respectively in chapters four and five. From this point, the book describes the trajectory of the slow decline of the navy as the center of the development of colonial medicine. In Bordeaux, this included, among other things, the
establishment of the Colonial Institute in 1901 and a new medical faculty a dozen years earlier, although it remained a stronghold of navy medicine into the twentieth century. In Marseille it included the city's long-standing fascination and activities with French colonialism, its established medical facilities and educational infra structure, as well as the founding of the Ecole d'application for colonial physicians in 1905. The final substantial chapter, chapter 6, examines the establishment of Paris as a key center of civilian colonial and tropical medicine by the early twentieth century. Especially influential were the establishment of the Institute of Colonial Medicine within the Paris Faculty of Medicine in 1902 and the energetic activities of professor Raphael Blanchard, medical parasitologist. By 1930, the centenary of the invasion of Algiers, colonial medicine in France was firmly ensconced in Paris, Marseille and Bordeaux and it had been transformed from a primarily naval enterprise to one firmly anchored in civilian and army medicine. In the conclusion, Osborne laments the final passing of the navy's influence in 2011 when ‘the navy's long battle of resistance to a full institutional incorporation into army medicine had ended’ with the closure of Toulon's Institute of Naval Medicine (p. 221). He also makes clear here that the navy had a lingering influence on colonial medicine in France up to this time, albeit in a less significant way than the centers in Paris, Marseille and Bordeaux. This book will appeal widely to historians: French historians, medical historians, military historians and colonial historians who will find it immensely useful. It will also appeal to some historical geographers as well as medical geographers interested in the history of their subfield. It has a lot to offer studies of medical geography from an historical perspective. Geographers in general, however, may find the discussions of place and regional geography a bit perfunctory and will likely wish for more maps of higher quality than the single, simple map provided on p. 12. The book is illustrated further with seven images taken from a variety of media relevant to the subject. For anyone interested in the history of medicine, the history of colonialism, military or French history, this book provides an essential and unique analysis that will influence scholarship for many years to come. Diana K. Davis University of California at Davis, USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2015.05.007
Christine Shepardson, Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2014, 312 pages, US$95 hardcover. Antioch, located on the Orontes River and known today as Antakya, the present capital of the Hatay province of Turkey, was during the period of the fourth and fifth century AD one of the Late Roman Empire's premier cities. Although little remains of the late antique urban fabric other than part of the city walls, a few significantly modified monuments, and the limited discoveries of archaeological excavations from the 1930s, the textual sources paint a vivid picture of life in the city both in terms of its political importance as an imperial capital and as a center in the development of early Christianity during the last centuries of paganism. Based on the availability of written sources from the fourth and fifth century, a significant corpus of scholarship has been produced about the city's history, its pagan orators and Christian religious leaders, and the city's role as a battleground for the often violent