Africa in Portuguese, The Portuguese in Africa

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An International Research Conference

April 18-19, 2008 - University of Notre Dame
Hesburgh Center for International Studies
Opening Remarks begin at 8:30 a.m. both days.

Africa in Portuguese, the Portuguese in Africa provides new scholarly perspectives on the relations between Portugal and its former African colonies. The conference addresses connections and borrowings between Portugal and Lusophone Africa and is designed to generate a book co-edited by Isabel Ferreira Gould and Pedro Schacht Pereira. The initiative pursues two main lines of inquiry. First, it debates the roles played by the Portuguese-speaking African countries in the continuous elaboration of a new postcolonial Portuguese culture, as well as the roles played by Portugal in the formation and transformation of the cultures of the Lusophone African nations. Second, it examines the ways in which the ongoing critical and theoretical debate in Lusophone African studies can have a positive impact upon the broader discussions of African studies and postcolonial studies, that is, how a regional discipline can contribute to shaping and enriching concepts that are to be used by scholars working in diverse fields and disciplines.

Conference Themes

• Transatlantic Lusophone relations

• Postcolonial cultural exchanges between Lusophone Africa, Brazil, and Portugal

• Misgivings of imperialism in Portuguese literature

• Affective territories of the Portuguese language

• Postcolonial theory and the reconfiguration of genres in Lusophone African literature

• Poetry and life-writing in Lusophone Africa

• Race, racism, and violence in Portuguese prose narrative after the Revolution

• Theories of Portugal’s subaltern colonialism

• Critiques of Portuguese colonial and Lusophone postcolonial difference 

• Antropofagia and its application to Portugal’s experience in Africa

• Patterns of citizenship in contemporary Mozambique

• Constructions of the enemy in Mozambique’s national memory after 1975

• Social interactions among citizens and migrants in post-imperial Portugal

• Visions of intimacy and fraternity under colonialism and neo-liberalism

• Africa and Africans in the new Portuguese cinema

• Images of urban life in Luanda, Angola

• Angola’s Kuduro: sexuality, gender, and nation in music and dance

Sponsors

External Sponsors
The event is sponsored by the Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento (FLAD, Portugal) and by the Instituto Camões-Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros (IC, Portugal).

Notre Dame Sponsors
The Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, the Office of Research/Graduate School, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Department of Africana Studies, and the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre.

Invited Speakers, Chairs and Discussants

Onésimo Teotónio Almeida
(Brown University)

Sam Amago
(University of Notre Dame)

Fernando Arenas
(University of Minnesota)

Patricio Boyer
(University of Notre Dame)

Nicholas Brown
(University of Illinois at Chicago)

Joseph Buttigieg
(University of Notre Dame)

Margaret Doody
(University of Notre Dame)

Isabel Ferreira Gould
(University of Notre Dame)

Kesha Fikes
(University of Chicago)

Kristine Ibsen
(University of Notre Dame)

Sheila Pereira Khan
(University of Manchester; CES, Universidade de Coimbra; CICS Universidade do Minho, Portugal)

Helder Macedo
(King’s College, University of London)

Luís Madureira
(University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Scott Mainwaring
(University of Notre Dame)

Paulo de Medeiros
(Universiteit Utrecht, the Netherlands)

Paulo Filipe Monteiro
(Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal)

Marissa J. Moorman
(Indiana University)

Carolyn Nordstrom
(University of Notre Dame)

Ondjaki
(Angolan writer)

Pedro Schacht Pereira
(University of Chicago)

Catherine Perry
(University of Notre Dame)

Richard Pierce
(University of Notre Dame)

Alison Rice
(University of Notre Dame)

Phillip Rothwell
(Rutgers University)

Leonor Simas-Almeida
(Brown University)

Gregory Sterling
(University of Notre Dame)

Omar Ribeiro Thomaz
(Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brazil)

Ivy Wilson
(University of Notre Dame)

Co-Organizers

Isabel Ferreira Gould and Pedro Schacht Pereira

Contact Person

Isabel Ferreira Gould, Ph.D.
University of Notre Dame
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
343 O’Shaughnessy Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556
USA

E-mail: ferreira.5@nd.edu