Across Continents employs Goan literary subjectivity as epistemology to critique a specific limitation of postcolonial thought, one that does not account for the situations or afterlife of Portuguese colonialism. Employing various novels, R. Benedito Ferrão considers the relationship between Portuguese and British colonialisms through the displacement of Goan characters across Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, and in so doing, highlights the cultural, historical, and political linkages between these continents. The experiences of these figures in dealing with the processes of nation, statecraft, and political intrigue at various historical junctures offer a comparative understanding of the tumultuous conditions of postcoloniality in the making of marginalized subjectivity.

Examining the mobility and diversity of Goan experiences as represented in works by Salman Rushdie, M.G. Vassanji, Roger King, and Margaret Mascarenhas, this book calls into question limits of citizenship, nationality, and notions of belonging. Ferrão centers seemingly minor figures to exemplify the effects of colonial and postcolonial changes that connect diverse geopolities. 

R. Benedito Ferrão is Associate Professor of English and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies at William & Mary. 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: The Many Worlds of Goa                                                                                      
2. The Missing Continent: (No) Africa in the Canvas of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children                                                                                                                                                    
3. A Lonely Goan in Once-British East Africa: Making India by Omission in M. G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets                                                                                                                         
4. Neoliberalism’s Everywhere and Nowhere: The Postnational Migrant in Roger King’s A Girl from Zanzibar                                                                                                                                
5. Conclusion – The Other Black Ocean: Indo-Portuguese Slavery and Africanness Elsewhere in Margaret Mascarenhas’s Skin                                                             
References