If Goa is your land, which are your stories? Narrating the Village, Narrating Home

Authors

  • Cielo Griselda Festino Universidade Paulista

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.v21i41.33427

Keywords:

Goa, multilingualism, literature, village.

Abstract

Goa, India, is a multicultural community with a broad archive of literary narratives in Konkani, Marathi, English and Portuguese. While Konkani in its Devanagari version, and not in the Roman script, has been Goa’s official language since 1987, there are many other narratives in Marathi, the neighbor state of Maharashtra, in Portuguese, legacy of the Portuguese presence in Goa since 1510 to 1961, and English, result of the British colonization of India until 1947. This situation already reveals that there is a relationship among these languages and cultures that at times is highly conflictive at a political, cultural and historical level. In turn, they are not separate units but are profoundly interrelated in the sense that histories told in one language are complemented or contested when narrated in the other languages of Goa. One way to relate them in a meaningful dialogue is through a common metaphor that, at one level, will help us expand our knowledge of the points in common and cultural and literary differences among them all. In this article, the common metaphor to better visualize the complex literary tradition from Goa will be that of the village since it is central to the social structure not only of Goa but of India. Therefore, it is always present in the many Goan literary narratives in the different languages though from perspectives that both complement and contradict each other.

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Original in English.

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Author Biography

Cielo Griselda Festino, Universidade Paulista

Possui graduação em inglês pelo Instituto Nacional del Professorado Joaquín V. González (1983), mestrado em Língua e Literatura Inglesa pela Universidade de São Paulo (2000) e doutorado em Língua e Literatura em Inglês pela Universidade de São Paulo (2005). Atualmente é professor titular da Universidade Paulista. Tem pós-doutorado na área de ensino de literaturas estrangeiras pela Universidade de São Paulo/FAPESP (2007-2009) e pós-doutorado pela Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (2010-2012) na área de narrativas pós-coloniais. Tem experiência na área de Letras, com ênfase em Literaturas de Língua Inglesa, atuando principalmente nos seguintes temas: literaturas de língua inglesa, com ênfase na literatura pós-colonial e ensino de literaturas estrangeiras.

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Published

2016-12-28

How to Cite

Festino, C. G. (2016). If Goa is your land, which are your stories? Narrating the Village, Narrating Home. Gragoatá, 21(41). https://doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.v21i41.33427

Issue

Section

Literature Articles