Early Modern Narratives of Diu’s Architecture and Space

Authors

  • Nuno Grancho Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Lisboa, Portugal

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7480/writingplace.2.2638

Keywords:

Colonial City, Diu, history, memory, literature, architectural practice

Abstract

It is difficult to envision the scope of how early European visitors of places in other parts of the world struggled to describe what they saw after their arrival. At that time, the classificatory arrangements for recounting peoples and cultures were provided by Aristotle or Herodotus. The practice of labelling and illustrating a place with words and images was made along the lines of what could be expected and known from a comparable place at ‘home’, adapting pieces to match the evident reality.

This article explores the sixteenth-century spatial descriptions of Diu authored by João de Castro, Gaspar Correa and João de Barros. It seeks to analyse how these observers identified and construed knowledge about difference in the architectural and urban space of Diu and how this related to wider historical-geographical discourses of the time, when there was no clear framework of territories within which cultural artefacts could meaningfully be organized.

 By approaching the question of histories and stories of Diu – a place profoundly grounded in Portuguese colonial imagery – through the evocations of visual and literary memory and the understanding of the built environment, the article reveals that a crucial field of inquiry about identity and memory in colonial locations in India has gone largely unnoticed by those who construct a sense of the passage of time. Ultimately, the article claims tangible constructions as legible documents of notional constructions and discusses construction processes, materials and critical receptions as evidence of the physical’s reciprocal relationship to the conceptual construction of the East in European culture.

Author Biography

Nuno Grancho, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Lisboa, Portugal

Nuno Grancho is an architect, an urban planner and an architectural historian and theorist who works at the intersection of architecture, planning, material culture and colonial practices and its relationship with the transatlantic world and (post)colonial Asia, from the early 16thcentury up to the present days.

Within this field, his research projects are focused on questions of human and material agency, the epistemology and geopolitics of architecture and urbanism as a technique of social intervention. Grancho specializes in the ties between colonialism and architecture and urbanism and has written widely about architecture, urbanism, art and architecture of empire, infrastructure, and the cultural landscape of European colonialism.

Grancho holds a Ph.D. in Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Coimbra since 2017.

In 2014, Grancho was a Visiting Researcher in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Since 2017, Grancho is a Senior Researcher at DINÂMIA'CET- Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Lisbon, Portugal.

Grancho is Head Researcher of the research project “Asia on the move: two-way Processes, Data and Legacy of Architecture and Urbanism from former Portuguese Colonial Territories in South Asia”,supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), Lisbon, Portugal, and hosted by DINÂMIA'CET- Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL).

 

References

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Published

2018-10-22

How to Cite

Grancho, N. (2018). Early Modern Narratives of Diu’s Architecture and Space. Writingplace, (2), 23–47. https://doi.org/10.7480/writingplace.2.2638