Dear Professors and Students,

We are most pleased to invite all to attend the following Seminar by Professor Pedro Pombo on “Macau, from the ocean to the archives: maritime labour routes, emigration and Chinese heritage in the Mascarenes” on Thursday, 13/11/2025, at 6:00pm in room E21-1029.

BIO

Professor Pedro Pombo

Lecturer at the Islands and Small States Institute, University of Malta

Pedro Pombo is a Lecturer at the Islands and Small States Institute of the University of Malta. Earlier he was a Marie Curie European Research Officer at the same institute with the project Heritage Ecologies, Culture, Resilience and Development in Island States, funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, European Commission.

After graduating in Decorative Arts and Design, Pedro received his PhD in Anthropology from ISCTE- IUL, Lisbon (2015) with an ethnographic exploration of space, belonging and local history in Southern Mozambique.

His research has focused on traces of Afro-Asian circulations through aesthetic and anthropological approaches, focusing on heritage, landscapes and memories in the Indian Ocean. He is co-author of the documentary “The Club” (2021), on the Goan diaspora in Tanzania, with Nalini Elvino de Sousa, funded by the RTP-Portuguese Television.

He was a fellow and received research grants from the IIAS-ACL, Leiden, The Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, Bayreuth University, Germany and the Cultural Institute of Macau.

His actual project investigates the role of heritages in promoting local economic development and social and environmental resilience in small island states and jurisdictions located in Europe and the Indian Ocean.

ABSTRACT

Macau, from the ocean to the archives: maritime labour routes, emigration and Chinese heritage in the Mascarenes

This presentation shares research on the role of Macao in the transoceanic transport of Chinese contract workers to the Western Indian Ocean world, and the cultural heritages, material and intangible, of Chinese origin in the archipelago of the Mascarenes, in the Southwestern Indian Ocean.

This work assumes a broad chronological scope, centred on the transport of contract workers from South China to the Mascarenes archipelago during the 19th century, with a special focus on the first decades of the system of indentured labour and taking us to the contemporary times and the Sino-Mauritian and Sino-Reunionese cultural presences.

The methodology is centred on an ethnographic approach, crossing archival research and heritage and cultural studies, and inciting dialogues between history and cultural landscapes, the past and the present, the archives and contemporary society. Following the presentation of the findings in archives in Mauritius and Reunion, I will explore the contemporary cultural landscapes of the Mascarenes through short vignettes that illustrate the ways history informs today’s insular cultures. Using the boutik sinwa (Chinese store in the Mauritian and Reunionese creoles) as a fundamental material, and intangible, heritage of life in the Mascarenes, I follow documentaries, artworks and published biographies to highlight how the first generations of Chinese migrants gave way to truly local communities.

IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE