Challenging the Colonial Complex: Open Class with Special Guest Lecturers
Schedule
Tue Oct 01 2024 at 04:00 pm to 06:30 pm
UTC-04:00Location
159 George Street, Providence, RI, United States, Rhode Island 02906 | Providence, RI
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Please join us on Tuesday, October 1st from 4-6:30pm in the Conference Room of Meiklejohn House (159 George St.) for Challenging the Colonial Complex, an open class with special guest lecturers Margarida Rendeiro, Patrícia Martins Marcos, and Pedro Schacht Pereira.ABOUT THE PRESENTATIONS
Colonial Spectres in Postcolonial Times: Representations in Historical Fiction (Dr. Margarida Rendeiro)
Academic research has shown the extent to which Portuguese history textbooks still promote an anachronistic view of Portuguese colonialism as if it belongs to the past only, detached from present-day forms of racism, for example. Some of the publishers of these textbooks also publish historical fiction that enhance a depoliticized view of history. This view is normalized by authors whose authority is legitimized by arguments of expertise and/or literary consecration. This lecture explores some of this recently published historical fiction to argue that, by normalizing the layers of silence with which public history was also constructed, it contributes to the perpetuation of colonial spectres in postcolonial times. After all, as Trouillot (1995) states, “the ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility,” and the fictional space can serve as a space for this to occur.
Confronting the Colonial Archive: Reclaiming Visibility amid Epistemologies of Occlusion in the Afro-Luso-Brazilian World (Dr. Patrícia Martins Marcos)
How to confront silences in spaces built to exclude and organized to occlude? Can colonial epistemes and the whiteness of the archive ever accommodate modes of existence incommensurate with their worldview? This analysis of the Portuguese colonial archive will engage with the normalized and tacit silencing of Black and Indigenous agency and consider new methodologies, beyond strictly the written record, that foreground resistance to colonial power. While part of this labor, I submit, can be recovered through a return to the sources and dedicating attention to narrative framing and the conceptual worlds evoked to produce colonial reports; this talk will also explore dimensions of archival refusal. Elaborating on the category “countervisual quilombismo,” introduced in the article “Blackness out of Place” (Radical History Review, Marcos 2022), this talk centers interventions by Black and Afrodiasporic agents in colonial built spaces, arguing these constitute a unique Black epistemic orientation of self-definition, autonomy, and refusal to define Blackness as a mere reaction to whiteness.
The Tears of Almeida Garrett: The Ventriloquist and the Black Specter of the Nineteenth Century Portuguese Literary Archive (Dr. Pedro Schacht Pereira)
In her 2019 book Potential History. Unlearning Imperialism, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay describes what she calls the “Differential Principle” as a process of disassociation that people living in the imperial metropole undergo in relation to the forms of brutal violence perpetrated in their name over the people in the colonies, and she sustains that “the mainland’s discipline should not be studied separately from the making of subservient bodies in the colonies” (Azoulay, 2019, 36). In this presentation I show that major writers whose works have been included in the Portuguese literary canon since the late nineteenth century have contributed to both the solidifying and the denunciation of the differential principle, and I examine the specific case of Almeida Garrett’s Frei Luís de Sousa (1843) as one in which the ‘voice of the people’, the “most poetic and the wittiest people of Europe” speaks through the tears of the writer as he is haunted by and ventriloquized by the Black specter. Through the careful rehearsal of a footnote that overtakes the entire corpus of Garrett’s iconic play, we are able to see how autobiography and Blackness bring the colonial scene directly to the heart of metropolitan self-imagination.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Margarida Rendeiro holds a PhD in Portuguese Studies from King’s College, London, an M.A. in Anglo-American Studies and a B.A. in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of Lisbon. She is an Integrated PhD Holder Researcher in the Centre for the Humanities (CHAM) at NOVA University of Lisbon. She is the Coordinator of the Research Unit for Transcultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies at the CHAM. She co-edited Challenging Memories and Rebuilding Identities: Literary and Artistic Voices that undo the Lusophone Atlantic (Routledge, 2019) with Federica Lupati and authored the monograph The Literary Institution in Portugal since the Thirties: An Analysis under Special Consideration of the Publishing Market (Peter Lang, 2010). She is a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Práticas da História. Journal on Theory, Historiography and Uses of the Past. Her research interests broach questions of women’s literature, Contemporary Cultures and Literatures in (**-XXI) in the Afro-Luso-Brazilian Atlantic; Forms of Cultural Resistance and Reparative Justice; and Afropean and Black Studies. She is the Principal Researcher of the I&D Project Women’s Literature Project: Memories, Peripheries and Resistance in the Luso-Afro-Brazilian Atlantic, funded by FCT/Portugal (2022-2024) and the Coordinator Abroad/Member of the Team of the Project Women in literature and visual arts: Representations of Indigenous and Afro-Brazilians, financed by CAPES/Abdias Nascimento Program (2024-2027).
Patrícia Martins Marcos is currently Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow – Rising to the Challenge – an initiative that promotes scholarship on racial equity at UCLA, where she is both affiliated with the Department of History and the Bunche Center for African American Studies. She is also an incoming Assistant Professor of History of Science, Medicine, and Technology in Latin America at the University of Oklahoma (January 2025). She holds a PhD in History and Science Studies from the University of California in San Diego and is currently developing a book project titled Imperial Whiteness, which explores how Portuguese settler colonial projects in early modern Portugal, colonial Brazil, Cape Verde, and Angola hinged on the strategic extension of white status to groups formerly excluded from its purview. This project offers an early modern genealogy of whitening policies (branqueamento), tracing its origins to Portuguese imperialism rather than modern nation building projects. Her work has been supported by, among others, FLAD, Fulbright, the Huntington Library, the John Carter Brown library, the American Philosophical Society, and the Center for Black and Queer Studies. Currently, she is lead expert in the history of science in an FCT project on Black nurses and anti-colonial resistance in Mozambique, integrating a team of scholars from Portugal, Brazil, USA, and Mozambique.
Pedro Schacht Pereira is an Associate Professor of Portuguese at the Ohio State University. He holds a licenciatura in Philosophy from the University of Coimbra (1993) and a PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies from Brown University (2005). He teaches a variety of courses on Portuguese, Brazilian and Lusophone African themes, with an emphasis on the formation of imperial discourses and their legacies in contemporary postcolonial cultures, Portuguese and Brazilian fiction from the 19th- to the 21st-centuries, and African Diasporic literature in Portugal. His current research focuses on Black subjectivities in Portuguese literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the twenty twenties. He has co-organized and participated in public events in Portugal about reparations and the legacies of Portuguese colonialism. Last Spring he was a visiting professor at Yale University.
This event is hosted by the Department of Portuguese & Brazilian Studies and co-sponsored by the Fundação Luso-Americana.
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Where is it happening?
159 George Street, Providence, RI, United States, Rhode Island 02906Event Location & Nearby Stays:
