Paper short abstract:

Van Linschoten’s Itinerario presents through literary and illustrated images a Goa, under Portuguese ruling at the end of the XVI century, as a site of excess and sensuality; a place where the intermingling of classes and ethnicities has lead to the decadence of the Portuguese political body.

Paper long abstract:

In 1583, John Huyghen van Linschoten embarks in Lisbon on his travels to the East, which included Mozambique, India, China and Japan, among others. In his narration of his travels, the Itinerario, the author not only describes maritime routes to the East to his Dutch audience and, later, English audience, routes that had been under the dominium of the Portuguese at the time, but also provides vivid descriptions in the text and the printed images of the different places, cultures and ethnicities that he encountered. The paper will present how van Linchoten's Itinerario provides to his audience a singular and distinctive optic as an outsider, neither Portuguese nor Indian, in his impressions of the socio-political conditions of the Indian territories under the rule of the Estado da India. Van Linschoten's text illustrates, through literary and illustrated images, the political situation of the Portuguese territories in India as decadent and tropicalized. Throughout the Itinerario, Goa emerges as an essentially feminized site according to European precepts; it is a fertile, luxurious and unstable place. Hence, Goa materializes in the text as both a rich place for economic venture, but also a site where the promiscuity of classes and bodies of the inhabitants lead to the decadence of Portuguese. In this way, the paper will explore the political body of the Portuguese in Goa as one that has turned into an effeminate, excessive and chaotic body: a political body that could be easily displaced by a more virile European political body like the Dutch or the English.