Roots that Hover above the Soil: A Case of Nonbelonging in the Subcontinent

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After how many generations can we call a land a home?

Join the Women’s Leadership and Resource Center for a talk by UIC MFA student Jovita Alvares exploring how colonial erasure, migration, the India-Pak Partition of 1947, and present-day state violence continue to affect notions of identification and belonging within marginalized communities of the Subcontinent. Her research focuses mainly on the Christian Goan diaspora community of Karachi, Pakistan, who are an ethnoreligious group in the country. As a group of people, they have continued to face violence, be it during the Portuguese colonial rule of Goa that lasted for 450 years, or even presently, as a religious group that makes up less than 2% of the country’s population. Despite this, what keeps them moving forward?

The answers, though abstract, lie somewhere within the vernacular archive. By studying family photographs, there is an exploration of the various factors, traditions, and rituals that possibly keep communities going. This research juxtaposes vernacular, state, and colonial archives as a way of bringing stories of the subaltern from the edges of history to the forefront.