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- Convenors:
-
Noemi Alfieri
(CHAM - NOVAFCSH, ACM - U. Bayreuth)
Helena Wakim Moreno (Universidade de São Paulo / Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
Send message to Convenors
- Location:
- B1 0.06
- Sessions:
- Friday 19 July, -, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to debate the circulation of ideas and the reconfiguration of identities starting from the production and circulation of printed materials - either books or periodical publications - written and red by Africans or in Africa on the second half of the XXth Century.
Long Abstract:
The circulation of printed material in the second half of the 20th Century reflected the cultural and social changes affecting Africa and the rest of the world. As the written culture was deconstructing the European heritage, it was struggling for its right to self-determination and to create a new pattern that could fit properly to the African reality.
Citing Stuart Hall, though, every form of identity has got its borders and limitations because it implies the narrativization of historical, cultural and linguistic resources. Imagining what it could become, a community adopts the representation that will function as interaction with the external world, creating a narration with fantastic elements.
As identity does not correspond to an immutable and essential core of a society, the main purpose of this panel is to understand how journals, literature and the press reacted to the renewed social, political and cultural configurations. How did the printed material circulate between the African countries and in which frame it was spread outside Africa? Which were the contacts between writers, journalists and thinkers native from the different countries, in a Pan-African perspective? What kind of internal ambivalences and contrasts were animating the cultural debate? Reflecting about these opened questions is necessary to deconstruct exclusivist discourses of national narrations and to promote a deeper comprehension of the phenomena that lead to a deep turning point in the African culture.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 19 July, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to reflect on the circulation of ideas between African and diaspora intellectuals in the writings of the poet, journalist and Mozambican militant Noémia de Sousa (Catembe, 1926 - Lisbon, 2002) since her first publications in Mozambican press and in other media until 1975.
Paper long abstract:
Could we consider that in Sousa's writings we see the emergence of an outline of a nation's project built from the intertwining of gender and negritude ideas, making clear the circulation of ideas between African and Mozambican intellectuals? Sousa was an active contributor in the Associação Africana and the Mozambican periodical "O Brado Africano", in which most of her poems were published, between 1948 and 1951. After that period, she lived in Portugal and France, working as a journalist and keeping in touch with intellectuals linked to the independence struggles. Outside of Mozambique, her poems were published in anthologies and there were mimeographed copies of a book called "Sangue Negro", spread around by admirers of her work. Here we present some considerations about this militant character and the political awareness of Sousa's writings in the Brado Africano editions. This includes her role as a social agent disputing multiple spaces with different actors, such as European whites from various backgrounds- especially Portuguese women, mestiços, blacks and Indians. Also, we seek to identify and understand her trajectory since 1951, discussing her connection with the students of the Centro de Estudos Africanos and the Casa dos Estudantes do Império, as well as the process of symbolic construction of the figure of Sousa, emphasizing her role in what later was designated as "Mozambican national culture". Through the themes that the poet presents in her poems and in her writings in newspapers, it is evident a multiplicity of subjects and strategies of resistance against the colonial situation.
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to reflect on the editoral project of Colecção Imbondeiro, from 1961 in Sá da Bandeira (now Lubango), Angola. Leonel Cosme and Garibaldino de Andrade gave life to an ambitious project that wasn't free of internal contradictions.
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims to reflect on the editorial project of Colecção Imbondeiro, which started in 1961 in Sá da Bandeira (now Lubango), Angola. Leonel Cosme and Garibaldino, working as both editors and writers, gave life to an ambitious project that wasn't free of internal contradictions. Despite its apparent lack of coherence for what concerned the choice of the writers published in the Colecção, for a total of 68 books, the collection achieved a significant impact in the Angolan culture of the 1960's, being distributed also in Cape Verde, Portugal and Brasil.
An analysis of the project itself will help us to reflect on the way in which dissent was controlled by Salazar’s regime in the 1960's. Gerald Moser compared, in 1966, the impact of the closure of the Imbondeiro publishing house to the one of the scandal of the attribution of the prize of Sociedade Portuguesa de Escritores to the novel Luuanda, by Luandino Vieira. Even if the two cases could seem much different, there was a link between them: the politics of control of dissent by the late salazarist regime. The eventual consequences of the literary representation of some social realities, such as the ones of the musseques or daily discrimination suffered by black people, led PIDE (the political police)to act either through censorship or through the annihilation of the editorial projects and the legal prosecution of writers.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on a broader research project on journals and African anti-colonialism from the 1940s to the 1970s, this paper seeks to gender the question of the circulation of print material through a focus on women's reading, writing and editorial practices in Conakry in the 1960s and 1970s.
Paper long abstract:
Attending to women's editorial, literary and political practices during years of internationalist pan-Africanism can shed crucial light on the forms of 'community' that print cultures engendered. Drawing on a broader research project on journals and African anti-colonialism, this paper seeks to gender the question of the circulation of print material in the years around African decolonisation. I focus on Portuguese-speaking women involved in writing and editorial work in Conakry in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Dulce Almada, an editor of the journal Libertação and Amélia Araújo, a producer and a broadcaster on Rádio Libertação. In this paper, I discuss questions of historiography, archiving and the (non-representative) significance of women's literary writing in these contexts.
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the 1950s and 1960s, we will try to draw a cartography of the foreign literary works' circulation among the Portuguese Speaking African Countries, in order to identify what kind of reception was possible among the intellectual groups and how they disseminated these works.
Paper long abstract:
Focusing on the 1950s and the 1960s, we will try to draw a cartography of the foreign literary works' circulation in the Portuguese Speaking African Countries, in order to identify what kind of reception was possible - considering the Portuguese dictatorship and inherent censorship - and perceive the impact of this literature on the intellectual groups and how they disseminated these works.
Names of American actors and writers of African descent (from the USA, Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, etc...), mentions to films and books passed hand to hand are references, sometimes hidden in the verse that enunciates them, or inscribed in the soirées where they were read out loud or in silence, in the newspapers that crossed the Atlantic. All of them built an archive that is urgent to study in order to grasp the ideas that circulated among poets and activists who since the 1950s are linked to the universe of resistance in the former Portuguese colonies. These elements reveal how influential movements such as Négritude and Harlem Renaissance effectively circulated among these groups.
Pursuing this goal our research will rely mainly on correspondence, press, as well as on cultural events and meetings held at Casa dos Estudantes do Império, the most important intellectual and dissemination meeting point.
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, a trilingual journal published from Cairo by the Afro-Asian Writers' Association, and investigates the literary and visual strategies for creating transnational "archipelagic" memory with a Pan-African relevance.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores entangled African memories surfacing from the "Afrasian" (Desai 2013) waters of the Indian Ocean by looking at the journal Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings as a site of construction of a transnational and polyvocal memory constellation in a Pan-African and Indian Ocean perspective. The spirit of Asian-African solidarity that emerged from the Bandung Conference of 1955, while premised on a mutual recognition of national interests and individual social trajectories, relied on an overarching narrative rooted in a collaborative practice of remembrance of the pre-colonial history of exchange and the shared experience of colonial oppression. Based in Cairo and inspired by the spirit of Bandung, Lotus was a trilingual journal published from the late 1960s by the Afro-Asian Writers' Association, bringing together stories, poems, works of art and studies by writers, artists and intellectuals from Africa and Asia. For emerging and established African writers in the 1960s-70s from across imperial formations and colonial and vernacular languages, Lotus served as a major platform for contact and reciprocal knowledge, and for initiating an "anti-Eurocentric project of comparatism" (Halim 2012). By mobilising Édouard Glissant's notion of archipelagic thinking (1997) and Ottmar Ette's concept of the trans-archipelagic (2010), both interpreted as epistemological alternatives for approaching Afro-Asian memory-making, I will investigate the literary and visual strategies used in Lotus for creating transnational archipelagic memory with a Pan-African relevance, focusing primarily on mémoires croisées (Vergès 2012) or intersecting acts of remembrance from African and Asian writers alike.
Paper short abstract:
We will present Jornal 57 as a publication that disseminated and inscribed Portuguese culture in its public, national and colonial spaces.
Paper long abstract:
Jornal 57, directed by António Quadros, debuted in May of 1957 with the subtitle of actuality, philosophy, art and science, literature, and preached a cultural eclecticism that would remain until the end of the publication in June 1962.
Printed as an "independent publication of culture", it immediately showed not only an intention of political independence from the Estado Novo but also from other movements or political groups. Jornal 57 was presented as a publication that was intended to represent an "authentic movement," which would have as its main objective a "profound renewal of the concepts that abusively overpower the Portuguese territory". A new program was therefore needed to free Portuguese culture from the foreign "isms" that prevailed at that time, and then to recover the "anthropo-cosmological forms in which the Spirit and Reason are particularized: the homelands." Once this was achieved, the conditions for refounding the Portuguese-speaking identity would be met and the newspaper would be the main way to reach the ultimate goal: disseminating and inscribing the Portuguese culture movement in its public, national and colonial spheres.
How this was actually done, the reactions it has generated and the results achieved are what we intend to discuss in this conference, starting from a case study, the jornal 57 - thus contributing to the study of the history of the diffusion of ideas and the reconfiguration of identities from the production and circulation of newspapers produced in Portugal in the second half of the twentieth century.
Paper short abstract:
In the late 1950s, "Mensagem", periodical published by the House of the Students of the Empire and "Cultura", a publication of the Cultural Society of Angola, exchanged literary contributions and brought young intellectuals from Angola who lived there in contact with fellow countrymen in Portugal.
Paper long abstract:
The purpose of this work is to address the connections established between two circles of young intellectuals, namely those who published the bulletin Mensagem in Lisbon, the periodical of the House of Students of the Empire (Casa dos Estudantes do Império) and those who led the newspaper Cultura in Luanda, an organ of the Cultural Society of Angola (Sociedade Cultural de Angola). In a context of heightened tensions caused by the imminence of the beginning of the independence war in Angola, the publications exchanged literary contributions, publicized the achievements of the other circle in their publications, narrowed their contacts through correspondences and exchanges of literary references. In addition, it was through the contact between the two circles that intellectuals responsible for Culture, such as Luandino Vieira, António Jacinto and Henrique Abranches, had their writings published as books through the Autores Ultramarinos collection, the editorial seal of the House of Students of the Empire.
These contacts helped to create networks and support points during the years of the Angola war of independence, both in Portuguese colonial space and in exile. In addition, it helped to strengthen in both places the idea that at that time there was an Angolan literature, which although incipient, had its own characteristics that differed from the so-called colonial literature.
Paper short abstract:
Between the 1960s and the 80s 20 literary translations were published from the Portuguese-Writing Africa in German or in Italian. This communication's aim is to investigate this corpus to verify the hypothesis of a net of left-wing solidarity in countries not directly involved in the decolonization.
Paper long abstract:
Five translations of African authors (among which two anthologies) from the Portuguese were published in Italian in book form between 1961 and 1969. After this, in the next 20 years no translation from Portuguese-Writing Africa appeared: just in 1989 a new generation of translators will begin again the task of publishing literature in Italian translation from that part of the World Literary System.
Roughly in the same period, between 1962 and 1988, 15 translations appeared in book form in the German market. Among the 15 publications, 10 of them were published in the German Democratic Republic, a communist country at the time.
While both the English- and the French-Speaking literary system - more attuned to the post-colonial literary production - had developed publishing spaces dedicated to African literature (such as Heinemann African Series or Présence Africaine) and were developing a taste for this production, facilitating also translation and acceptance of foreign-language African literature, in Italy and Germany the circulation of this production seems to be more random.
A closer analysis of translations into German and Italian in this period can, however, show how the net of solidarity with the anticolonial fight and then with the new nations arisen from the fight - all of which aligned with the Eastern bloc - constituted an alternative way through which literature circulated abroad.
This proposal will focus on the Italian and German translations of this period, investigating the publishing and translating structure and agenda behind these publications, in order to validate our hypothesis.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will examine the books of Angolan authors published in Angola, Brazil and Portugal between 1960 and 1974, which, distributed in Portugal and Angola, have entered into the lists of titles considered inconvenient by the Conselho de Leitura de Angola, and confiscated by the PIDE.
Paper long abstract:
Based on the investigations carried out in the Arquivo Histórico Diplomático and the Torre do Tombo National Archive, in Portugal, the paper presents and analyzes the books of Angolan
Authors published in Angola, Brazil and Portugal between the years of 1960 and 1974, distributed in Portugal and Angola, which were part of the lists of titles considered inconvenient by the Conselho de Leitura de Angola (1965-1974); they were censored by the Direção dos Serviços de Censura/Direção-Geral de Informação (Directorate of Censorship Services / Directorate General of Information) and apprehended by PIDE. From the books and reading reports of their apprehension, we will try to indicate the identity marks present, while at the same time we will reflect on the guidelines of censorship for the Angolan publications.