Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.

Start by marking “Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race” as Want to Read:

Other editions

Enlarge cover

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Open Preview

Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race

Arun Saldanha

4.04 · Rating details · 46 ratings · 5 reviews

"Psychedelic White is one of the most innovative, refreshingly different analyses of race I have read in the last decade." —Elizabeth Grosz, author of The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely

The village of Anjuna, located in the coastal Indian state of Goa, has been one of the premier destinations on the global rave scene for nearly two decades. The birthplac "Psychedelic White is one of the most innovative, refreshingly different analyses of race I have read in the last decade." —Elizabeth Grosz, author of The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely

The village of Anjuna, located in the coastal Indian state of Goa, has been one of the premier destinations on the global rave scene for nearly two decades. The birthplace of Goa trance, the most psychedelic variety of electronic dance music, Anjuna first attracted adventurous Westerners in the 1970s who were drawn there by its tropical beaches, tolerant locals, and readily available drugs. Today, rave tourists travel to Goa to take part in round-the-clock dance parties and lose themselves in the crowds, the music, and the drugs. But do they really escape where they come from and who they are?

A rich and theoretically sophisticated ethnography, Psychedelic White explains how race plays out in Goa’s white counterculture and grapples with how to make sense of racism when it is not supposed to be there. Goa is a site of particularly revealing forms of interracial collision, and contrary to author Arun Saldanha’s expectations that the nature of rave would create an inclusive atmosphere, he repeatedly witnessed stark segregation between white and Indian tourists. He came to understand race in its creative dimension as a shifting and fuzzy assemblage of practices, environments, sounds, and substances—dance skills, sunlight, conversation, cannabis, and tea. In doing so, his work shows how the rave scene in Goa harbors conflicting tendencies regarding race. The complicated intersection of cultures and phenotypes, Saldanha asserts, helps to consolidate whiteness. Race emerges not through rigid boundaries but rather through what he terms viscosity, the degree to which bodies gather together for pleasure and self-transformation.

Challenging the prevailing conception of racial difference as a purely social construction and offering building on the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Psychedelic White presents nothing less than a new materialist approach to race.

Arun Saldanha is assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota. ...more

Get A Copy

Paperback, 288 pages

Published July 11th 2007 by Univ Of Minnesota Press (first published January 1st 2007)

More Details... Edit Details

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Reader Q&A

To ask other readers questions about Psychedelic White, please sign up.

Be the first to ask a question about Psychedelic White

Lists with This Book

This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Add this book to your favorite list »

Community Reviews

Showing 1-30

Average rating 4.04 ·

Rating details

· 46 ratings · 5 reviews

More filters

Sort order

Start your review of Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race

May 22, 2021 Christopher rated it liked it

Rarely have I encountered a book of such wide interest, yet couched in such unnecessary academic waffle and fluff. The hippie scene of Goa was legendary from the early 1970s to the turn of the millennium, eventually sparking the "Goa trance" dance music phenomenon and developing a reputation as a place of peace and love. Yet the predominantly white members of Goa’s scene (along with the many Japanese and Israelis who joined them) always existed in tension with the local Indians, seeing the latte Rarely have I encountered a book of such wide interest, yet couched in such unnecessary academic waffle and fluff. The hippie scene of Goa was legendary from the early 1970s to the turn of the millennium, eventually sparking the "Goa trance" dance music phenomenon and developing a reputation as a place of peace and love. Yet the predominantly white members of Goa’s scene (along with the many Japanese and Israelis who joined them) always existed in tension with the local Indians, seeing the latter as square and intrusive and erecting various barriers to their participation. Author Arun Saldanha, a Belgian sociologist with an Indian parent, found it curious that a peace-and-love counterculture could actually be racist. This book documenting and exploring this theme is based mainly on two seasons around the turn of the millennium which Saldanha spent doing participant-observation in Goa.

Besides its valid point that the Goan scene had a real problem with Indians, one of the good things about this book is simply the amount of information on the scene, which is now history: already during the era documented here, the regional government had begun to discourage freak communities and low-budget backpackers, aiming at a higher-spending and less morally offensive demographic. By the time I myself visited the western coast of India a couple of years after this book’s publication, Goa was pretty gentrified and not only had the freak scene moved to the beach community of Gokarna further to the south (in Karnataka state), but even the Karnatakan scene had already run its course. Saldanha describes in detail how the Goa freaks and their backpacker admirers lived, what their daily schedules were like, how they moved around . He carried out interviews with many people in Goa, foreigners and Indians alike, to gain a historical context of three decades of Goan tourism and the attitudes of the foreigner community.

The bad thing about this book is that between the clearly written, informative parts, the reader has to trudge through writing that contributes little to the fascinating examination of Goa, but which only serves to boost Saldanha’s street cred among his fellow academics. Sometimes it is merely annoying terminological choices, for example, instead of simply using the normal words "person/people", Saldanha usually writes "body/bodies" as was the fad at the time. But other times it is many paragraphs in a row pointing to some theoretical construct of Deleuze & Guattari, Bourdieu or Levinas. ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

May 31, 2020 Carlos Picón rated it it was amazing

Such a pity I took it from the university library and had to return it before finishing it due to Covid, because it was fucking great, I was really enjoying it.
Amazing insights of the contradictions in the hippy raver scene.

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Feb 07, 2020 Giselle added it

I was interested to read this anthropological study of the psy-trance subculture... A subculture that interests me for some reason.
The thesis is: long term resident, white "Goa Freaks" are all assholes. I am convinced. ...more

flag Like · see review

Apr 29, 2019 Raja Guttula rated it really liked it

Arun is pretty trippy

flag Like · see review

Sep 26, 2007 Emily added it

Shelves: lendable

It's fun to read books by people you know. This is one of the first titles I was involved with at the UMPress. Weirdly (since it is an academic book), I read the whole thing -- spread out over trips to Chicago and British Columbia, but still ... whenever the theory drags (and how draggy can it be when Arun quotes people saying things like "WE ARE MULTI-MUTATING GLOBAL INFORMATIONAL BEINGS"??), there's plenty of good ethno-anecdotes to pull you back in. Also, some useful concepts for thinking abo ...more

flag Like · see review