Paper short abstract:

My aim is to explore how the images produced in the Guinea-Bissau liberation War legitimized the idea of a nation state and simultaneously generated silences and absences of elements which, being part of symbolic and military resistance, escape the frames of modern hegemonic meaning.

Paper long abstract:

Between 1963 and 1974 took place in Guinea-Bissau one of the most important struggles against the Portuguese colonial rule. This struggle was led by Amílcar Cabral, one of the most important anti-colonial thinkers of the XX century. Taking as a weapon, cinema played an fundamental role on the diplomatic victories achieved.

The choice of the cinematic image as an object of study is related to its political importance. During the anti-colonial struggle as well as other struggles, it was a favoured instrument of denunciation and a fundamental political narrative in finding fields for the emancipation of Guinean people, which aimed to give the people back its culture (Cabral, 1974:35).

In dialogue with different approaches from the postcolonial studies field, I will carry out an analysis and consequently an interpretation of its findings, which could reveal how images produced during the liberation struggle period silenced narratives that do not fall within the ideological structures of modernity. Therefore, I will explore the religious aspects linked to the liberation struggle as a field where the epistemology of the absent subject can be revealed which do not dovetail with the ideological devices that in modernity constitute the political community. Specifically, considering the importance of religious aspects in indigenous populations that inhabit the Guinean territory and the artificiality of borders that draw it as a state, I intend to explore the hypothesis that spiritual entities create forms of territoriality (Lund, 2006), which remain silenced, since they are neither translatable nor possible to archive.