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Killing Images: Iconoclasm and the Art of Political Insult in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Portuguese India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2018

Jorge Flores  and
Giuseppe Marcocci
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Abstract

The article builds on a succession of visually disturbing events that occurred in Goa—the capital city of Portuguese India—during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From the early years of the Portuguese conquest (1510), Goa went through a redefinition of its urban space, which implied the appropriation and re-semantization of buildings and other key sites of the old Muslim city. This process included the spread of images and symbols related to several Portuguese viceroys, soon-to-be targets of acts of political insult and even political iconoclasm performed by their Portuguese opponents in a context of growing factionalism. We speak namely of episodes of protest against places of memory associated to different clans, encompassing statues (both official and bogus), textual inscriptions, and viceroys’ portraits. These were European phenomena to a large extent, but coloured by significant local and native elements. The article engages with a grid of questions that places real statues, satirical effigies, and erased faces (and the diverse reactions they have aroused) in dialogue with current debates on popular politics; high and low vis-à-vis the colonial social fabric; the uses of public space; verbal, written, and visual insult; political languages; and disputed authority in an imperial setting.

Keywords

Portuguese EmpireGoaviceroyspolitical factionalismvisual dissentpublic mockery
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , December 2018 , pp. 461 - 489
Copyright
© 2018 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

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Footnotes

*

Jorge Flores is professor of Early Modern Global History at the European University Institute, Florence. He specialises in the social and cultural history of the Portuguese Empire in Asia, with particular focus on a cluster of themes that speak to several other cultural zones of the early modern world. His most recent book is Unwanted Neighbours: The Mughals, the Portuguese, and Their Frontier Zones (OUP, 2018).

‡

Giuseppe Marcocci is associate professor in Iberian History (European and Extra-European, 1450–1800) at the University of Oxford and a fellow at Exeter College. His main research interests lie at the intersection of politics, culture, and religion in the early modern Iberian world. He has recently co-edited with Lucio Biasiori the volume Machiavelli, Islam and the East: Reorienting the Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

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