Questions of language, multiligualism e exile

Questions of language, multiligualism e exile Even more important are the studies by Lévy-Strauss; by members of the Latin American “decolonality” group such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijanol; by anthropologists such as Aparecida Vilaça, Yvone de Freitas Leite, Elisa Loncon Antileo and Pedro Niemeyer Cesarino; and by indigenous leaders such as Ailton Krenac. The latter both denounce the extermination of native languages and also study them, trying to record them as far as is still possible. With this intellectual investment they recover the languages’ memory and, with it, a pre-colonial cultural universe.

30.03.2019 | by António Pinto Ribeiro

48 war portraits 48 time boms 48 elegies

48 war portraits 48 time boms 48 elegies Whether in terms of its officially ensconced denial or the radical geopolitical reformulation of Portugal after decolonization, the Colonial War remains historiographically unresolved. The experience of participation in the war is one of the most repressed and complex, but also one of the most tragic, events of Portuguese contemporary life, and it continues to resonate today.

30.03.2019 | by Margarida Calafate Ribeiro

Seeing With Another Person’s Eyes

 Seeing With Another Person’s Eyes The work suggests that another person’s perspective, and their particular capacities, affects the inherited vision. This vision, diminished or amplified, can cloud, obscure, or deform the receiving view; but it may at the same time provoke the heir to explore the ways that their perspective belongs neither only to them, nor any longer only to the bequeather. And this question, which starts with recognising this inheritance, can also be the starting point for other visions.

23.03.2019 | by Fátima da Cruz Rodrigues

On the colonial war: memories and post-memories, transmission and imagination

On the colonial war: memories and post-memories, transmission and imagination The distance between the writer and the traumatic reality about which they write determines the result of literary attempts to convey the experience of violence. Nevertheless, there are similarities between the artistic representations of memory offered by direct witnesses of events and those re-elaborated by their descendants (those we call post-memories).

24.02.2019 | by Felipe Cammaert

European colonization of Americas killed so many it cooled Earth's climate

European colonization of Americas killed so many it cooled Earth's climate Research finds killing of native people indirectly contributed to a colder period by causing deaths of around 56 million by 1600. European colonization of the Americas resulted in the killing of so many native people that it transformed the environment and caused the Earth’s climate to cool down, new research has found. Settlers killed off huge numbers of people in conflicts and also by spreading disease, which reduced the indigenous population by 90% in the century following Christopher Columbus’s initial journey to the Americas and Caribbean in 1492.

22.02.2019 | by Oliver Milman

Interwinings: peripheral arts, artivism and post-memory

Interwinings: peripheral arts, artivism and post-memory The neologism “artivism” was coined in the 1960s to describe demonstrations against the Vietnam War, as well as student movements and counter-culture. The situationist Guy Debord theorized this conjuncture in his book “The Society of the Spectacle” (1967), in which he argued that it was necessary to overcome existing modes of politics and art, to sabotage the demands of capitalism and to find new modes of art and life. The term reappeared only in the mid-1990s, with the internet revolution, as part of a critical lexicon to describe not only the practice of political art, but also to interrogate what counted as politics and art. In that context, the fundamental question was the transformation of capital into a spectacle, and subsequent artistic problematics.

12.02.2019 | by Fernanda Vilar

The (re)uses of the past

The (re)uses of the past This reusing of the past requires us to reflect on how traumatic histories are collectively absorbed, and on how histories can be revised, even distorted, when they are reread. When the past is reused, its image is reinscribed through the prism of a particular, usually other, ideology with the intention of evoking a particular past and creating its counter image. This manoeuvre often has hegemonic ambitions, and aims to impact public opinion.

02.01.2019 | by Roberto Vecchi

An implosive exilic geography

An implosive exilic geography What Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida writes can be understood as a powerful transformation tool regarding the Portuguese human landscape. With it, the painful fragments of a history made up of frustrations and disappointments, of ruptures and withdrawals and of ambiguous felling are not erased, instead they are reunited in a healing coexistence.

01.01.2019 | by Inocência Mata

Angola wants its dolls back

Angola wants its dolls back The discussion about the restitution of ethnographic works – be them artistic, documental or human remains – to the countries of origin is not new, but regained prominence two weeks ago with the announcement of Emmanuel Macron’s decision to return a bronze collection to Benin, from where the artworks were taken at the end of the 19th century in a punitive military expedition against the kingdoms of west Africa.

29.12.2018 | by vários

Restituting artworks: a decisive step in the process of decolonization

Restituting artworks: a decisive step in the process of decolonization Three options emerged for the museum’s “reorganization”. First, there was the possibility of clearing the museum’s contents and reopening as an empty museum. Second, there was the option of destroying the museum and building a new one. The third tabled choice was to come up with a reinvented museology that would engage with the museum’s history to present a critical view of colonialism.

23.12.2018 | by António Pinto Ribeiro and Margarida Calafate Ribeiro

The city made him indecisive and gloomy

The city made him indecisive and gloomy Their story becomes the usual story of many immigrants coming from the old colonies in search of medical treatment or of a better life. In Angola, Cartola was a midwife. In Lisbon, he became a construction janitor, and the city made him indecisive and gloomy. Aquiles, who was still a teenager when he switched country, no longer felt Angolan.

23.12.2018 | by Tatiana Salem Levy

Remittances, Migration and Development in Cape Verde

Remittances, Migration and Development in Cape Verde brain drain is a problem. Emigration in Cape Verde is not a bed of roses. In fact, it has created a serious problem of brain drain. One common situation involves young students who decide to study abroad (in Portugal, for example) and do not return to Cape Verde after completion of their university education. According to data between 1997/98 and 2002/2003, about 77% of students (around 5,382) left the country and did not return.

16.12.2018 | by Cláudia Rodrigues

Cape Verdean labourers, settlers and emigrants

Cape Verdean labourers, settlers and emigrants They arrived in Angola 100 years ago. They witnessed the decline of a colonial power that instrumentalized them and the birth of the Angolan nation. The memory of Cape-Verdean immigrants in our country tells a story of oppression and resistance that the creole sociologist Nardi Sousa salvaged and is to publish in a book.

13.12.2018 | by Pedro Cardoso

To be African in Cape Verde is a Taboo

To be African in Cape Verde is a Taboo Cape Verde is not Africa, Cape Verdeans are “special blacks” and the closest to Portugal. Cape Verde is the country of miscegenation, the “proof” of “racial harmony” of Luso-Tropicalism. For many years, this was the dominant narrative. To be or not to be African continues to be a question.

04.12.2018 | by Joana Gorjão Henriques

Why the sandwich will not take over Cape Verde

Why the sandwich will not take over Cape Verde  In Cape Verde, the sandwich is not making significant inroads. It continues to be foreign, prepared fresh and appreciated by tourists and in a restricted circle of young middle-class professionals. This must be understood within the social and economic context. The following discusses whether or not the sandwich stands a chance in the Atlantic. It looks at the history and current development of Cape Verde, focuses on food issues, and explores how the sandwich fits in.

24.11.2018 | by Kaian Lam

Mythology and memory

Mythology and memory On the contrary, myth derives from oral traditions and has its roots in the fantastic. At the same time, although myth does not need reality to acquire meaning, it does maintain some contact with experience and the world, as a kind of reality-in-disguise.

12.11.2018 | by Roberto Vecchi

The gulf between truth and memory

The gulf between truth and memory When history and duties to memory are ignored, truth can easily be thought of as a personal choice. Once accommodated in powerful discourse, these “truths” assume impunity: often disregarded and rarely condemned, even though they represent hate speech. Hatred has been normalized and has propelled a radicalism in which “good” struggles against “evil.” In this dichotomy, evil is once again the ‘other’. A discourse that does not humanize the ‘other’ authorizes barbarism – as we have seen in the post-election reactions

05.11.2018 | by Fernanda Vilar

Liberty / Diaspora a universal chronology of the history of decolonization

Liberty / Diaspora a universal chronology of the history of decolonization The societies in which we live at different latitudes are legacies of colonialism and constituted by imperial ruins. Depending on our skin colour, social class, academic background and where we live, we can inherit privilege – by benefitting directly or indirectly from the wealth European exploration accumulated – or we can inherit, even accumulate, the oppression of institutional racism and be exposed to inequality and racist colonial violence.

04.11.2018 | by Bruno Sena Martins

Designing national identity through cloth: the pánu di téra of Cape Verde

Designing national identity through cloth: the pánu di téra of Cape Verde Ana Maria Garcia Nolasco da Silva Member of the Research Unit in Design and Communication (UNIDCOM) of the Creative University of Lisbon (IADE-U) and of the Centre for Comparative Studies (CEC) of the University of Lisbon. analascosapopt@gmail.com In the same way each re-invents his own childhood by creating a narrative – one out of many possible others – with which he identifies in the present moment, so can it be said that national identities are continuously created retroactively though discourse, of which their citizens are active participants.

18.10.2018 | by Ana Nolasco

Europe, periphery of the creole islands

Europe, periphery of the creole islands  They are stories from which the narrator takes on the ambiguities of the discourses of negritude and whiteness, racism and antiracism, the plasticity of discrimination, the trap of stereotype, and the awareness of prejudice. These are stories that point us to a common past made up of very different memories.

02.10.2018 | by Margarida Calafate Ribeiro