Black, between painting and history

Black, between painting and history The authors were confronted with the lack of information on the representation of black men and women in European painting, which led them to very direct and immediate questions: who were the people represented? What were the motivations for representing them? And why did black people in European painting rarely have individualized identities?

10.07.2019 | by Ana Paula Rebelo Correia

Restitution is everywhere

Restitution is everywhere Noting that this subject is now everywhere is to suggest that it has transcended the politico-museological sphere to become part of the public and media space. This is relatively positive, particularly if it is accompanied by actual interventions and insightful debate. Yet the process, which was never going to be straightforward, has become more complex, and acquired new problematics.

08.07.2019 | by António Pinto Ribeiro

Conference: The Empire of Law. Legality and Other Narrative Tools of Colonialism

Conference: The Empire of Law. Legality and Other Narrative Tools of Colonialism Eurocentric power needs to create narratives about colonial history in order to control interpretations of it. Concepts of law and justice have played an important role in this. Also today, the idea of justice is used to approve violent migratory control policies, including the aggressive persecution, detention, and deportation of persons.

22.06.2019 | by vários

European masks

European masks Why does Europe (still) have such trouble showing a coherent attitude in the face of discourses which legitimate racism and xenophobia? What are the masks that stop it from accepting its colonial past and understanding, once and for all, that diasporas are part of the richness of the European cultural map?

22.06.2019 | by Felipe Cammaert

T.A

T.A had brought a dry twig with me from the bushes I hid in for a couple of days. Everytime I hear there is a fire on that island, I just find myself thinking about it... Also brought a couple of snail shells from the same bushes. Why? If the day comes that I forget about it, they would remind me what it is to move forward... even at the speed of a snail..."

16.06.2019 | by Sinem Taş

The refusal of war and the colonial abyss

The refusal of war and the colonial abyss The difficult subject of a politically null war and the traumatic end of the imperial cycle have tended to produce a memory of the colonial war which – though often stressing its “tragic” and “useless” dimension – still emphasizes participation in it as a question of duty. This casts the figure of the veteran as a victim, either of the “winds of history”, or as having been forced to fight.

16.06.2019 | by Miguel Cardina

Recalcitrant domestics on the radical radar

Recalcitrant domestics on the radical radar Hartman offers new methodological pistes for literary critics working in archives and shows how literary studies can learn from the wayward lives of women like Esther Brown to expand its understandings of creative practices. Reading Hartman reminds us of the political imperative to interrogate spaces and structures of oppression, confinement and conformism from the perspective – speculative if necessary – of those who resist them.

04.06.2019 | by Alexandra Reza

The black people in Portugal

The black people in Portugal The increasing centrality of the voices of black and Afro-descendent people in Portugal, speaking out against racism and the inequality of opportunity that it generates, is the best guide to how to reconfigure an ancestry that deserves to be revived and reinvented.

26.05.2019 | by Bruno Sena Martins

“Congoísmo”, to the north (and south)

“Congoísmo”, to the north (and south) Os “Congos” foram vários e o “Congoísmo” revelou-se maleável na forma e conteúdo, mas estável na utilidade. Assim sendo, a invocação da sua história e da sua memória só pode ser muito cautelosa. Aspecto importante, requer ainda que se considere a sua história não-europeia, a sua natureza transnacional, transregional e transatlântica, mas também no próprio continente africano. Que não se anule diversidade de actores, instituições, “discursos” e imagens, motivações e interesses.

21.05.2019 | by Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo

Autotopographies - Peter Weiss in Auschwitz

Autotopographies - Peter Weiss in Auschwitz Reflection on the transgenerational dimensions of the notion of memory is, however, of course, much earlier than Hirsch’s proposal. In particular in Holocaust literature, the construction of a memory of the “not-lived”, characteristic of the postmemorial gesture, builds up a model that can be abundantly traced and that, precisely due to the power of the paradigm of confrontation with the Holocaust or the ensemble of studies on violence, trauma and memory, deserves particular attention.

04.05.2019 | by António Sousa Ribeiro

The Valley of the Fallen in 21st century Spain

The Valley of the Fallen in 21st century Spain The fact that Franco is buried in sacred land, the Basilica, and his family’s decision to bring the body to Madrid’s Cathedral if he is exhumed from the Valley, a measure they bluntly oppose, has prompted the Government to search unsuccessfully for complicity in the Vatican, scaling up the controversy to a diplomatic realm. The fate of Franco’s body, still today in the Valley, has transformed into a formidable political and memorial arena questioning the ability of Spain’s democracy to defeat once and for all the resilient ghost of its last dictator.

06.04.2019 | by Francisco Ferrándiz

Language Policies: Language, Power, and Citizenship

Language Policies: Language, Power, and Citizenship language embodies the resolutions and contents of its own past as much as its present and future. But language is also a social reality and thus acts as a means of practical communication and by forming subjective awareness. Apart from being one of the basic rights of all human beings (according to the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights), using one’s “home language” in social dealings is one of the contradictions arising in the era of globalization.

02.04.2019 | by Inocência Mata

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