[reminder] Goa’s Bom Jesus as Visual Culture: The Basilica’s Image, Architecture, History and Identity
Friday, 20 December 2024 | 6 pm
HISTORY HOUR
Goa’s Bom Jesus as Visual Culture:
The Basilica’s Image, Architecture, History and Identity
Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar
Associate Professor, Goa College of Architecture, Goa, India
Moderated by
R. Benedito Ferrão
Assistant Professor, of English and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies,
William & Mary, Virginia, USA
BOOK LAUNCH
Vishvesh Kandolkar’s monograph, ‘Goa’s Bom Jesus as Visual Culture: The Basilica’s Image, Architecture, History and Identity,’ will be released by Fr. Patricio Fernandes SJ, Rector of the Basilica of Bom Jesus, followed by a History Hour lecture by the author.
Please join us for a History Hour lecture on ‘Goa’s Bom Jesus as Visual Culture: The Basilica’s Image, Architecture, History and Identity’ by Vishvesh Kandolkar and moderated by R. Benedito Ferrão on Friday, 20 December 2024 at 6 pm at the Xavier Centre of Historical Research, Porvorim.
Please join us for tea at 5:30 pm.
Goa’s Bom Jesus as Visual Culture
The Basilica’s Image, Architecture, History and Identity
This book chronicles the visual history of the Basilica of Bom Jesus, one of the longest-surviving churches from Goa’s Portuguese colonial era. In the sixteenth century, this baroque church in Old Goa was constructed to house the sacred relics of St. Francis Xavier and is emblematic of Goa Dourada or Golden Goa.
Despite their early modern origins, monuments like the Basilica continue to influence visual culture that pertains to Goa. Accordingly, this book uncovers the traces of architectural images of Goa’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century monuments and conducts a genealogical study of how uses of religious architecture shift over time. Thus, even as the Basilica originally functioned to portray or recall a grand empire by evoking the notion of Goa Dourada, its iconicity has been employed in marking Goa’s difference from the rest of India thereafter. By employing an analysis of historical texts, illustrations, photography, film, and pageantry, this volume demonstrates how the image of the Basilica has been employed to create a discourse on Goan identity. In fact, right from the colonial period, when Goa was heralded as the Rome of the East, to the post-Portuguese period, when Goa became an idyllic destination for leisure tourism, architectural images of Bom Jesus have been central in shaping Goa’s identity.
Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar
Vishvesh Prabhakar Kandolkar is Associate Professor at the Goa College of Architecture, India. His research on Goa’s architectural history focuses on early modern church design as well as the evolution of Indo-Portuguese aesthetics from the colonial to the postcolonial period. His writing has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, the Oxford Journal of Hindu Studies, eTropic, the Journal of Human Values, and Economic and Political Weekly.
R. Benedito Ferrão
R. Benedito Ferrão is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies at William & Mary, Virginia, USA. Additionally, he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Mellon, Endeavour, and Rotary programs, the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. As a Fulbright and AIIS fellow, Dr. Ferrão was a scholar-in-residence at the Xavier Centre of Historical Research in 2019 and 2021, respectively. This year, Dr. Ferrâo was awarded the Jinlan Liu research prize in APIA Studies.
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