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Re: Our 3rd rendez-vous on Friday, April 24
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Hello, David Morton, What can I say except that I'm sincerely grateful for your willingness to share some of your time to help me with my quixotic project. I will confess that I'd been trying to read your book so that I can appear well-informed in the event we exchanged communication, but i've known of your existence for less than a week, so i've only managed to read the introduction (is this the sort of thing that historians say to each other when they meet at conferences?). For the benefit of the rest of the readership and decidedly not in an attempt to ingratiate myself, I will say that there's more than a little to be excited about from the intro. the insights you begin to tease out about the manifold anxieties of land, tenancy and ~informality~ have a lot of relevance in post-colonial urban spaces around the world. one of my other pet interests is dravidian south india, mediated largely through tamil language movies and some contemporary tamil fiction. this might be an exaggeration but it seems like fully half of tamil movies that i've seen feature some element of this ancient anxiety, whether it's among the tamil community of contemporary kuala lumpur (e.g. Kabali), that of mumbai's Dharavi "slum" (Kaala) or?the hardscrabble dockside neighborhoods of north chennai (as in Vada Chennai?by the great Vetrimaaran). hell, much of the post-independence political struggle in the city of mumbai can be read through the anxieties of the communities that asserted competing claims on the city's increasingly rarefied spaces. I also really appreciate the note you make about the obsession with "informality" in describing some of these developing and post-colonial economies/societies and how the concept masks the often byzantine unwritten rules that underlie how things operate--this applies so deeply to the india that i've experienced. Also extremely important, in my view, is this sentence:? Those who would govern and those who would be governed also reached desperately for one another--usually without success. This is so good because it acknowledges (something extremely rare) that a government that in hindsight is deemed to have been a failure, or worse (and this seems to be the consensus about the?Frelimo state), can also be acknowledged to have been comprised of people with legitimate aspirations of benefiting their societies. This sort of compassion seems pretty rare in?contemporary humanistic/social scientific scholarship and it's the sort of thing that is required at moments of grotesque social division. Also, this one: The Frelimo state was . . . an almost fictive entity needing people to fill it with content and meaning. This is really evocative and I think I understand what you're getting at, but i'll give the discussion of your work a rest now aside from noting the allied scholarship you mention regarding these issues in South Africa, Dar and Zanzibar. But, in all seriousness, what is it with the peculiar darkness that seems to attend Portugal's post-colonial spaces? I'm going to have to write again to give you an idea of what my pending travel to Tanzania is all about (hint, mainly birds, but humans and history and politics always play a role in the things that move me), but that promises to be a long email and i've got legislative histories to compile just now. I was going to say that I'd send this longer email directly but now that this whole group of men-of-a-certain-age has been party to the beginnings of this encounter, who am i to deny them the satisfaction of seeing it through? more soon, david ford p.s. speaking of portugal's history of nautical adventurism, any of y'all ever read The Land of the Great Image?by Maurice Collis? On Wed, Apr 29, 2020 at 9:17 PM David Morton <davidsmorton1975@...> wrote:
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