Across Continents: Transnational Asian/American Perspectives (Fall 2026 Seminar)

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Six Sessions
Tuesdays, September 22 & 29; October 6 & 20; and November 10 & 24, 2026 | 12pm to 1:30pm

25 West 43rd Street, 10th Floor, Suite 1000
between 5th & 6th Avenues, Manhattan

RSVP (per session): https://2026seminar-ferrao.eventbrite.com

Using a variety of literary and other texts, some referenced in R Benedito Ferrão’s Across Continents: Writing Goans, Making Worlds (2026), this six-session seminar will examine representations of displacement, post/coloniality, and transnationalism. These works are predicated upon Afro-Asian, Indian and Atlantic Ocean, Asian diasporic, and lusospheric cultures and identity-making. Concerned with what constitutes a border and how identity and representation, both, fix and contest such limits, the texts that seminar participants will read ask us to consider how we think of the nation and its relationship to the marginalized across multiple global sites. We will gauge how caste, gender, class, race, and sexuality intersect in the creation of identity and culture in colonial, postcolonial, and im/migrant contexts in literary depictions that recharacterize geopolitical belonging.

Readings with no links will be sent to registered attendees before each session.

Session 1 (September 22) – Wor(l)ds

  • “The Beginning” in Afterlife: Ghost Stories from Goa by Jessica Faleiro (Rupa 2012): pp. 107-122
  • “Garcia de Orta: The Sephardic Jew who Made India his Home” by Staff in Madras Courier (14 February 2024)
  •  “Goa on the Literary Atlas: Questioning Belonging” by R. Benedito Ferrão in Teaching South Asian Anglophone Diasporic Literature, eds. Nalini Iyer and Pallavi Rastogi (Modern Language Association of America 2024), pp. 79-89

Session 2 (September 29) – The Ocean(s) Between

Session 3 (October 6) – Some Other Country

  • “The Africa Boat” by Laxmanrao Sardessai, trans. Paul Melo e Castro (1964), np
  • “How Ascolino de Perpétuo Socorro Lost his Wife” by Mia Couto, trans. David Brookshaw in Third World Quarterly 12.1 (1990), pp. 167-174
  • “Of Prison Walls and Barroom Brawls: Postcolonial Categories in Mia Couto’s ‘De Como Se Vazou A Vida de Ascolino de Perpétuo Socorro’ and Laxmanrao Sardessai’s ‘O Barco da África/The Africa Boat’” by Paul Melo e Castro in The Lusotropical Tempest: Postcolonial Debates in Portuguese, eds. Sheila Khan et al (Department of Hispanic, Portuguese & Latin American Studies, University of Bristol 2012): pp. 127-150

Session 4 (October 20) – Continental Drift

Sessions 5 & 6 (November 10 & 24) – Un/Familiar Cartographies

Author Bio

R. Benedito Ferrão is Associate Professor of English and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies at William & Mary, with affiliations in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. His honors include being named University Professor for Teaching Excellence (2025-28), the Jinlan Liu Award for Research in APIA Studies (2024-27), a Coco Faculty Fellowship (2026-27), a Fulbright-Nehru Research Award (2019-20), and fellowships with the American Institute of Indian Studies and the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at Bayreuth University.

Ferrão earned his Ph.D. at Birkbeck College, University of London, and has taught at UCLA, BITS Pilani Goa, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, and William & Mary. His research and teaching focus on Afro-Asiatic connections across Portuguese and British post/colonial histories and on diasporic fiction engaging race, gender, and sexuality, an interest closely tied to his curatorial work with artists such as Karishma D'Souza, Angela Ferrão, and Maria Vanessa de Sa, including the exhibition and book Goa/Portugal/Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar (Fundação Oriente, 2017).

Ferrão's first monograph, Across Continents: Writing Goans, Making Worlds (University of Michigan Press, 2026), joins his children's book The Girl Who was the Color of Nothing: A Children's Story for Adults (The Uninvited, 2026), illustrated by Maria Vanessa de Sa. His collaboration with the artist Vamona Navelcar featured in the exhibition and book Goa/Portugal/Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar (Fundação Oriente, 2017); that retrospective would be the last time Navelcar's art was seen publicly during his lifetime.