Cultural Production and the Legacies of Colonialism

CULTURAL PRODUCTION AND THE LEGACIES OF COLONIALISM IN CONTEMPORARY PORTUGAL

A SEMINAR AND PERFORMANCE ORGANISED BY CARLOS GARRIDO CASTELLANO AND SOFIA DA SILVA MENDES

3rd of May 2019

University College Cork. O’ Rahilly Building 2.03

9 AM-1 PM

• Presentation
• 9-10: Marta Pacheco Pinto (Universidade de Lisboa) Orientalist legacies in contemporary Portugal: translation, Japan, and a gap
• 10-11: Maria Tavares (Queen’s University Belfast) No Country for Nonconforming Women: Feminine Conceptions of Lusophone Africa
• 11-12: Leonor de Oliveira (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) Expressions of Contemporaneity: Dealing with Dictatorship and Colonialism in the Post-war Period.
• 12-13: Carlos Garrido Castellano (UCC SPLAS) Bottom-Up Creativity and Literary Visions of Afro-Lisboa.

Coffee and refreshments will be served as part of the event.

Speakers’ Bionotes:

Marta Pacheco Pinto (PhD in Translation History, 2013) is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Comparative Studies, University of Lisbon, with a project that seeks to build a critical bibliography of published translations in Portugal from Japanese (1543-2014). As member of the Centre for Comparative Studies, she is the principal investigator of two research projects: Moving Bodies: Circulations, Narratives and Archives in Translation and Texts and Contexts of Portuguese Orientalism – International Congresses of Orientalists (1873-1973).

Maria Tavares is a Lecturer in Portuguese Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her research has explored the possibilities arising from thinking nationalism and national identity through gender and she is currently conducting research on the processes of construction and representations of female heroism in Mozambique.

Leonor de Oliveira is FCT postdoctoral research fellow at the Instituto de História de Arte at Nova University, Lisbon. She is currently preparing a monograph on Portuguese artists in Britain and the resistance to the Estado Novo dictatorship.

Carlos Garrido Castellano is Lecturer of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at UCC. His last book is Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art; Space, Politics, and the Public Sphere (2019).

 

The Granary Theatre, 3-4:30 PM

Bairro das Ex-Colónias. Legacies, family transmissions and postmemories of Portuguese Colonialism in Africa

a performance-lecture by Joana Craveiro

featuring collected testimonies, private archives, images and documents

In Lisbon, as in other parts of the country, the cartography of the city still retains the legacies of a fallen empire - the “Former-Colonies Ward” or Bairro das Colónias is one ofthose areas of the city where the one can stroll through “Mozambique Street” or “Angola Street”. In other such neighborhoods, the colonial names of certain cities in Mozambique, or Angola, are still depicted in the street names, like “Cidade de Salazar Street” (nowadays N’dalatando) or “Lourenço Marques Street” (nowadays Maputo). This anachronistic naming of these streets is the departing point for this performance lecture, which presents and describes several stories of children of the so-called ‘returnee’ (‘retornados', the name given to the colonists that returned to Portugal during the decolonization process of 1974-75). How is this colonial and post colonial memory transmitted within a family? What kind of representations of 'Portuguese Africa' do this postmemory generations have?Bearing these questions in mind I went to look for whoever wanted to talk to me about this. I found Daniel, Sónia, Nicolau, Pedro; and I later found others. I also found my own relationship tears this past through a photograph that no one would explain to me. I had to find out for myself. But isn’t it always like that with memory? Annette Kuhn states “The past is like a crime scene”. Indeed. 

Joana Craveiro is a Portuguese director, writer, performer and teacher. She holds a PhD from Roehampton University, in London, with a thesis entitled: “A Live/Living Museum of Small, Forgotten and Unwanted Memories – Performing Narratives, Testimonies and Archives of the Portuguese Dictatorship and Revolution.” She holds a Master Degree in Directing, from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD, 2004), a Degree in Anthropology (BA Hons, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, FCSH, 2003), and a Bachelor Degree in Acting (BA, Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema – ESTC, 1997). She has further studied with Alexander Kelly (Third Angel, UK), Goat Island and Every House has a Door (Chicago). Her performance lectures have been shown in international conferences since 2012: New York, Aarhus, Bristol, London, Skopje, Dallas, Montreal, Barcelona, Bangalore, Belém do Pará, and several venues in Portugal. She is artistic director of Teatro do Vestido, a theatre company based in Portugal, for which she has written, directed and performed over 40 pieces in the past 19 years, since she founded the company. Craveiro is associated researcher at Instituto de História Contemporânea IHC/Nova, in Lisbon. She is interested in the poetics and the transmission of memory, and her work intersects autobiography, (political) memory and private archives.