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Joao Afonso Baptista, The Good Holiday: development, tourism and the politics of benevolence in Mozambique. New York NY and Oxford: Berghahn Books (hb US$120/85 [pounds sterling]-978 1 78533 546 4). [...]

This article takes John Berger's seminal book on art criticism, Ways of Seeing (1972), as a starting point for looking at the South Asian monsoons from the perspective of wetness. Revisiting Gupta's 2012 work 'Monsoon Fever' to think through its watery elements as more closely tied to the visual, sensorial, and affective, it focuses on three distinct representations of the monsoons: photographer Ritesh Uttamchandani's 2014 'Facing the Monsoon' series set in Mumbai, which showcases a range of personalised attitudes towards contending with monsoonal rains as an urban infrastructure; journalist Cynthia Barnett's journey to write the story of the fine art practice of crafting attars in Kannauj, India, wherein the fragrant earthy wetness of the monsoon (considered 'rain perfume') is captured in a bottle, and includes synthetic versions; and lastly, a lone photograph by Arko Datto that suggests the sublime monsoon as affect in all its subdued wet colours but also portends climate change for South Asia. Together, these watery readings suggest a renewed attention to ways of seeing the monsoon differently, via the visual, sensorial, and affective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stone Town's busy streets in the 1950s became a set for photographer Ranchhod Oza, proprietor of Capital Art Studio (1930–83). I was aesthetically drawn to the numerous bicycles portrayed in these Zanzibari images, just as Oza had been at an earlier time and place. I am less interested in reading the subject of bicycles as simply a sign of Zanzibari modernity, an accoutrement that projects a fantasy of advancement via technological things. Instead, I focus on their ability to reflect various material aspects of daily life in Stone Town. Some bicycles carry people, others transport things, while still others appear as stage props, leaning up against walls while waiting (im)patiently for their owners to return. Yet in all these Oza images, they are moving still, ready to reach another chosen destination. What does the content of bicycles say about Oza's photographic style? Can these bicycles potentially speak to Zanzibar's placeness as a cosmopolitan Indian Ocean port city? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I propose to take up the concept and physical space of a photographic ‘darkroom’ located in Stone Town, Zanzibar, to explore a set of images from the Capital Art Studio (1930–present) collection produced by Ranchhod Oza (1907– 93), and inherited by his son Rohit Oza (1950–). I employ a concept of darkness to read this visual archive differently and propose multiple ‘other lives’ for a set of images. First, by bringing this African photography collection to light, I am taking it out of the ‘dark rooms’ of history in one sense and exposing it for interpretation. Second, I focus my lens on the Oza physical darkroom located in the back of the studio on Kenyatta Road in Stone Town, where photographs of a range of Zanzibari persons were both developed and printed and that open up the darkroom as a place of photographic complexity and sensorium, and not just mechanical reproduction. Third, I develop darkness as a form of beauty in certain images of sky, water and skin from this archive that showcase Zanzibar’s position as an Indian Ocean island and port city whilst under rule by the Omani Sultanate (1698–1964) and British Protectorate (1890–1963). Fourth, I conceptualise the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 as a time of visual darkness, which temporarily restricted photographic practices operating in Stone Town under the new Afro-Shirazi political party. Throughout my analysis, I use a framing of ‘darkness’ to interrogate photography as an aesthetic practice deeply immersed in materialities and metaphors of dark and light, black and white, and as integral to Zanzibar’s oceanic islandness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The years following the Marikana massacre were tumultuous ones in South Africa, characterized by corruption scandals, economic downgrades, rising unemployment and increasing resistance to Jacob Zuma's presidency from South Africans across race, class, regional and political lines. The country's outlook was pessimistic with dystopian predictions circulating widely as the Zuma regime slowly attempted to erode hard-won democratic processes and poverty skyrocketed. As we write this article, South Africa has once again shifted with the election of Cyril Ramaphosa as president, the removal of Zuma allies from key ministerial posts, the Gupta empire under threat and state capture investigations taking off. The South African cultural imaginary has swiftly shifted again with optimistic narratives emerging and confidence growing amidst the grace and dignity of a new president who once again embodies the liberation movements' more glorious years after the first elections (despite Ramaphosa's association with Marikana). This trajectory though is not a new one for South Africa that tends to swing between fear and optimism, pessimism and hope, on a very regular basis. This yo-yo effect is characteristic of the South African cultural imaginary with its consistent peaks and troughs that results in a rather resilient, interesting and highly politicised population despite its differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author shares her experiences of being architect, novelist, and academic, and highlights some of her works. She shares that at the age of seventeen, she was given two books by a Scottish poet and mentions that the books changed her life forever. Topics discussed include her master's degree in architecture from Great Britain; and the success of her debut novel Sundowners released in 2004 which was published in thirteen languages.

The article highlights the work and career of architect and academic, Lesley Lokko. Topics discussed include her style of writing and the fictional characters of African women set in post-colonial pan-African setting; her bestselling novels written between 2004 and 2014 and her online presence; and her thoughts on mobility in a cosmopolitan tradition.

Ugandan and South African contemporary women's narratives reflect on the rapid pace of change in the social lives of women in two countries that are contending with the aftermath of conflict and violence. This article will interrogate how contemporary women writers such as Goretti Kyomuhendo (Whispers from Vera), Zukiswa Wanner (The Madams and Behind Every Successful Man) and Cynthia Jele (Happiness is a Four-Letter Word) are embracing chick-lit as a form of writing, while simultaneously short-circuiting this genre to create an experimental form that allows them to reflect on the realities of women and engage with the contradictions, complexities and ambiguities of contemporary feminine subjectivities. Although chick-lit as a genre has been dismissed as trivial and frivolous, ostensibly because it deals with women's experiences, this article argues that this particular form of chick-lit is more political and attempts to disrupt the original chick-lit by offering a critique of society. It articulates how women see themselves and their relationships with their parents, spouses and, most importantly, female friends; reflects on the challenges that modern women face in the work environment; interrogates women's realities concerning love, marriage and motherhood; explores concepts of sexual desire and intimacy; and negotiates the dilemmas of a patriarchal society, while also confronting issues of class and race. These contemporary women writers are adopting this genre because it allows them to reflect on realities that are complex and uncertain, to transform gender relations, to redefine the roles of women and to construct new feminine subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The turn to optimism makes figures of progress, consumption, self-making and empowerment appear in various genres of chick-lit. These narratives, however, are often still shaped by a depressive tone that is distinct from one that says that women have more options than happy-ever-after, even while heterosexual romance remains a structuring force. This article takes the Ghanaian web-series An African City as its example to explore this ambivalence. An African City offered its first season in 2014 and was immediately received as 'Africa's own Sex and the City ', praised for challenging the image of a backward Africa, while criticised for offering an unrealistic account of life for urban African women. The series is set around the lives of five women, one of whom plays the leading role as narrator. The 'African city' serves as another character, rather than a mere backdrop for the action to unfold. I argue that the various characters perform an ongoing ambivalence towards progress, always stuck in a look backward. It is not simply that the quest for romance fails as part of the drama, but that the drama of failure itself folds onto both the African city and African women as figures that remain eternally stuck in their relation to the temporalities that accrue around modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the novels Icône urbaine (2005, Urban Icon) by French-Togolese writer Lauren Ekué and Blues pour Elise (2010, Blues for Elise) by French-Cameroonian/Afropean writer Léonora Miano, with regard to their contribution to chick-lit in a broad sense. With a focus on urban working women, their love lives and consumerism, these novels fulfil a number of criteria of mainstream chick-lit. At the same time, however, a serious concern for structural power relations is inscribed into these texts. Both novelists make ample use of intermedial writing such as structural borrowing from and references to music, TV formats and the fashion press. I will analyse these narrative strategies and address how far Ekué and Miano copy, rewrite and reinvent the Anglo-American chick-lit genre from the transnational perspective of the African Diaspora in France and considering the peculiarities of black Paris as a space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crime fiction by women writers across the globe has in recent years begun to explore the position of women detectives within post-feminist cultural contexts, moving away from the explicit refusal of the heterosexual romance plot in earlier feminist 'hard-boiled' fiction. In this article, I analyse Hawa Jande Golakai's The Lazarus Effect (2011) and The Score (2015) as part of the tradition of crime fiction by women writers in South Africa. Joining local crime writers such as Angela Makholwa, Golakai not only questions orthodox conceptions of gender and sexuality in traditional iterations of the crime novel, but also combines elements of chick-lit with the crime plot. Reading the archetypal quest structure of the two genres against the background of Sara Ahmed's cultural critique of happiness, I argue that Golakai inventively recasts the recent sub-genre of the chick-lit mystery from the perspective of an Afropolitan detective. Her detective tenaciously undercuts the future-directed happiness script that structures conventional chick-lit and detective novels with their respective focus on finding a fulfilling heterosexual, monogamous romantic relationship, and the resolution of the crime and restoration of order. In this way, the novels defy the frequently assumed apolitical nature of chick-lit texts and also allow us to reimagine the idea of Afropolitanism, outside of its dominant consumerist form, as a critical Afropolitanism that emerges from an openness to be affected by the unhappiness and suffering of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The success of popular women's fiction requires a mode of analysis that is able to reveal the patterns across this category in order to better understand the appeal of these books. Popular fiction, like chick-lit, can be contradictorily framed as simultaneously constituting one, as well as many genres, if a genre is the codification of discursive properties. It may consist of romances, thrillers, romantic suspense and so forth in terms of its discursive properties, but popular women's fiction will also have a pattern of similarity that cuts across these forms – that similarity, I will suggest, lies in the idea of pleasure as a genre of affect that ties various popular fictions together, thereby acting as a type of imperial genre. Pleasure is so ubiquitous and so diverse across the multiple forms that constitute popular women's fiction that I argue it has become a genre in itself. This is, however, not a genre that limits itself to one particular stylistic form, but rather, as a dynamic social construct, it has become a genre of affect that invokes feelings of pleasure. Nthikeng Mohlele's most recent novel, Pleasure, exemplifies the applicability and plasticity of the concept of pleasure, allowing me to examine this work as a type of fictionalised theory which I then apply to South African chick-lit texts: the Trinity series by Fiona Snyckers and Happiness Is a Four-Letter Word by Cynthia Jele. Mohiele's expansive theorisation of pleasure is inherently local in that it is depicted at the level of experience and imagination; yet it is simultaneously macro and global in the connections made to deeply political circuits of identity-based oppressions and structural inequalities. Mohlele reveals the mobility of pleasure as a genre that offers an opportunity to think through the circuits that connect popular fiction through the lens of African literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including femininity and feminism, consumerism and branding, and the new circuits of mobility afforded to African female protagonists.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including conceptualizing the Global South by calling troops from the colonies in World War I; Lebanon's decolonization; and a tour of Melanesia.

An introduction to a collection of papers on vernacular photography is presented, with topics including the use of portraits to reclaim one's space and sense of identity and belonging; and the digital transformation of a collection of family photographs by the artist Vivan Sundaram.

In his influential BBC series and landmark book on art criticism, Ways of Seeing (1972), author John Berger suggests that how we see things is determined by what we know. This article takes up his point to explore creative ways of seeing (and thus reading, viewing, interpreting, writing about, displaying, curating) the Ranchhod and Rohit Oza (father and son) vernacular photography collection from Stone Town, Zanzibar that spans 1930 to the present. This paper is a visual experiment; it provides an alternative way of approaching the Capital Art Studio (CAS) archive less as a body of work that serves as a window onto or illustration of Zanzibari history, daily life and culture. Rather this paper offers an alternative organisational framing, one that is a working through of the distinct characteristics of the medium itself, with a focus on incompleteness and its ability to "look." Here the paper takes on ideas of patina, pose and punctum to open up and shift to more (sensuous) ways of seeing the Oza archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses topics within the issue including synthesis of histories of Mozambique; public policies and governmentality in Mozambique; and creating transnational institutions that directly intervene in lucrative national parks in Mozambique.

To enter Old Goa during the 2004 Exposition of St. Francis Xavier's "Sacred Relics" is to experience a world where the corporeal and the carnivalesque coalesce. It is a ritual and religious space wherein the corpse of a 16th century Jesuit missionary-turned-saint takes center stage: pilgrims and tourists stand in the same line to "see" Xavier's corpse and "touch" his glass casing, Goa's (Portuguese) colonial legacy is exhibited for public consumption, Catholic religious services and lectures on this missionary's biography in a variety of languages take place at regular intervals, makeshift stalls sell numerous iconic objects associated with the saint, and finally, the uncertainty of Xavier's fate is exposed. In this article, I explore the many facets of this exposition of Goa's patron saint, suggesting that by taking part in these highly ritualized acts focused on Xavier, tourists and pilgrims simultaneously transform the space of Old Goa, consume its "Portuguese" past, and become part of history-in-the-making in the face of the increasing fragility of his corpse. Although this paper is based on ethnographic research conducted in 2004, its themes remain relevant given that Xavier's last decennial exposition was staged in 2014-2015, and will continue to take place at ten-year intervals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages Goan diasporic dynamism in littoral East Africa – Mozambique and Zanzibar, respectively. It begins by considering a series of images taken by Mozambican photographer Ricardo Rangel, that of a rural Goan fishing community living across the bay from Lourenço Marques (present day Maputo), in the small village of Catembe in the early 1970s on the eve of Portuguese decolonisation. It then places this photo archive in dialogue with one compiled by Ranchhod Oza, of Capital Art Studio in Stone Town, Zanzibar, with a focus on his visual representations of a minority Goan community during the 1950's that took up positions as tailors and bakers (and photographers) in this urban setting that was once a thriving centre of cosmopolitanism and global trade. That both of these communities are the product of Indian oceanic circuits of exchange mobility will suggest the role that understudied minority communities had in forming port cities scattered across littoral Africa. Using these visual bodies to think about intersections and divergences of representations of Goan-ness in two distinct locations and timeframes, the article brings new cultural forms, i.e. the visual, to the fore for elaborating on the (Goan) African everyday, expressive moments captured on film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trained as a photojournalist, Ricardo Rangel (1924–2009) has contributed some of Mozambique's most iconic images, even as many of his colonial-era photographs were banned or destroyed by Portuguese censors. In this article, using the concept of the archive as less a repository than a process, I delve into his photographic collection that, for me, speaks so cogently about Mozambican society during the last years of Portuguese colonialism (1961–1975), both in its representational aspects as well as its ability to generate critical commentary and insight. I focus on three themed sets of his photographs, that I engage with in my writings on Portuguese Mozambique, as a form of ‘auto-ethnographic’ intervention (Ellis, Adams and Bochner 2011; Russell 1999). Framing my discussion of Rangel's images (and imaginary) as a form of ‘intimate exposure’ (Bystrom and Nuttall 2013: 308), I explore photography's potential to suggest the contours of individual lives and experiences on the cusp of colonial independence and which, in turn, can be used to build a Mozambican public–private archive, thus contributing to its collective memory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article takes the "island" as a key trope in tourism studies, exploring how ideas of culture and nature, as well as those of paradise (lost) are central to its interpretation for tourists and tourist industries alike. Increasingly, however, island tourism is blurring the line between geographies of land and water, continent and archipelago, and private and public property. The case of 'The World' islands mega project off the coast of Dubai (UAE) is used to chart the changing face and future of island tourism, exploring how spectacle, branding and discourses of the gigantic, miniature, and fake, alongside technological mediations on a largescale, reflect the postmodern neoliberal world of tourism and the liquid times in which we live. Artificial island complexes such as this one function as cosmopolitan 'non-places' at the same time that they reflect a resurgence in (British) nascent nationalism and colonial nostalgia, all the whilst operating in a sea of 'junkspace'. The shifting cartography of 'the island' is thus mapped out to suggest new forms of place-making and tourism's evolving relationship to these floating islandscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every year on 29 June members of an immigrant Goan fishing community living in the port of Catembe (Mozambique) gather for a religious ceremony at a designated spot on the shore overlooking the Indian Ocean with Maputo's skyline as a backdrop. They pray to São Pedro (Catholic St Peter) to bless their boats for the coming fishing season. Afterwards, they take out their highly decorated vessels, very often dedicated to Catholic patron saints, into Maputo Bay for a maritime procession. This essay takes as its entry port this ritualized annual event to look more closely at religious connectivities between India and East Africa, via Portuguese colonizing and conversion processes, and across the Indian Ocean. That this rite of passage has endured over four generations for this ‘littoral’ Catholic Goan community, one that largely relies on commercial prawn fishing as a way of life, suggests the power of religious practices, including the Catholic pantheon of saints, to migrate alongside persons. That this feast day celebration takes place at the oceanfront, the place they originally arrived as migrants from Portuguese India by ship at the turn of the twentieth century, suggests the ways in which Catholic religiosity is used to commemorate Goan migration and culture simultaneously. Lastly, that this maritime parade is dedicated exclusively to St Peter, the Catholic patron saint of fishermen the world over, suggests the importance of fishing – not only as a means of economic livelihood, but also as a source for community solidarity and social reproduction – in the daily lives of this dynamic diasporic group that presently numbers approximately one hundred families. Ethnography, literature and photography are used as forms of postcolonial intervention in carving out old and new (Indian) oceanic geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The monsoon provides a useful spatial template for thinking more generally about the future direction(s) of Indian Ocean studies. Precisely because of its defining character – it connects water and sky, and links geography (specifically climate and climate change) with politics and development – it allows us to engage with the “oceanic” more seriously. In addition, the monsoon offers a point for reflection on connectivity – that is, on how people, things, and ideas travel in a changing Indian Ocean world. This paper is a discussion of the monsoon in its many registers – as an annual storm system unique to the Indian Ocean (Pearson 2003); as a (lyrical and embodied) aesthetic that provides a way to trace what is in the process of being lost in the face of dramatic environmental change (Frater 1991); and finally as a security measure, or “development discourse” (Kaplan 2010) in a changing political and economic climate wherein the Indian Ocean is poised as the next strategic arena in a post-American world (Hofmeyr 2009). Each register, in turn, will have consequences for thinking anew about the temperate future(s) of Indian Ocean studies by asking conceptual questions about the vestigial and the imminent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the idea of Indian political leader Mahatma Gandhi on swaraj or self-rule. It emphasizes swaraj as an analytical leveler, emphasizing the book "Hind Swaraj" as a statement of transnational politics. It also examines Gandhi's conceptual views on swaraj in reference to the particularities of the Goa Question. Moreover, it elaborates the lack of cartographic specificity to rethink Gandhi's views on swaraj concerning the particularities of the Goa case.

An essay is presented on how the Goan Mozambicans living in Maputo locate themselves in relation to their decolonized pasts. The author is critical on the three subjectivities which function as the points of friction that constitutes the lives of Mozambicans as cosmopolitans which include the transnational, postcolonial and local. The author highlights the connections among the three subjectivities in specific locations and experiences.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses an article on the various indignities suffered by bodies of black indigents in colonial and apartheid South Africa by Garrey Dennie, one on how both the sacred and the secular can make competing claims to an image and body of an icon after death by Liz Gunner, and another on the immanence of death in the modern polity by Achille Mbembe.

This article takes as its analytical focus a little-known travelogue written by the well-known British traveller, translator, and proto-ethnographer, (Sir) Richard Burton. Entitled Goa and the Blue Mountains, Or Six Months of Sick Leave, it was not well received at the time of its publication, despite the apparent British 'thirst' for this literary genre. Central is the theme of 'imperial ills' as seen from the point of view of a recuperating English army officer catching rarifi ed glimpses of daily life in 'moribund' Portuguese India. Burton's prescient and often acerbic descriptions of Goa are foregrounded to suggest their import for revealing British colonial attitudes towards the Portuguese as their colonial counterparts in India, and concomitantly, for understanding Anglo-Portuguese relations during a crucial period in India's colonial history. Taking Burton to be both a representative figure and not of British colonial discourse during the mid-nineteenth century, his various portrayals of the Estado da India as an ill-fortuned empire in decline, with fateful lessons to be learned for the British as the would-be colonial successors of the Portuguese in India, are critically analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by David Featherstone regarding a court-martial following a mutiny on the ship "Grampus," one by Jon Hyslop on the trade of firearms by smugglers on the Indian Ocean and one by Emma Christopher on what might have happened had sailor Edward Thompson survived to supervise the creation of a penal colony in South Africa. The article also discusses the mutiny on the English ship "Bounty" and how it illustrates qualities of sea voyage narratives.

Graft co-polymerization of monomers acrylamide (AAm) and itaconic acid (IA) on to cotton fabric has been carried out in aqueous medium using ceric ammonium nitrate as initiator under the catalytic activity of nitric acid. The cotton fabric was optimally initiated in 20 mM aqueous solution of initiator for 15 min, followed by its immersion in aqueous solution containing of monomers AAm and IA, and cross-linker N,N'-methylene bisacrylamide (MB)at 30°C. To obtain optimum conditions, the percent grafting was investigated as a function of concentration of the monomers, the cross-linker and the initiator, reaction temperature and time of immersion for initiation. The grafted cotton fabric was also investigated for its water uptake behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on mapping Portuguese decolonisation in the Indian Ocean. It is posed that Portugal was both the first and the last European colonial nation, first establishing its coastal territory in Africa in the late 15th century and only waiving its hold in 1975 when Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique attained their independence.