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Our Conferences.Conference: The Lusophone Black Atlantic in a Comparative Perspective.Dates: 10-11 March 2005 Venue: Institute for the Study of the Americas, London. Room 12, 35 Tavistock Square Conveners: David Treece, Nancy Naro and Roger Sansi-Roca, Centre for the Study of Brazilian Culture and Society, King’s College London. Despite the seminal importance of Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic…( 1993) in defining the conceptual field of the Black Atlantic, the Lusophone World is conspicuously absent from his study, as has been often observed by Brazilianists. Within Lusophone cultural history, the perspective has traditionally been that of imperial expansion (e.g. Boxer 1991, Russell-Wood 1992), or has been limited to national boundaries (Russell-Wood 1982) or the early colonial period (Russell 1995). Otherwise, work on individual cultural topics, including the history of black music, has until recently been typically framed within debates about nation identity and “authenticity”, and rarely in terms of transnational flows or exchanges. There are some suggestive new departures from these perspectives. Alencastro (2000) argues the case for viewing the “Portuguese South Atlantic” of the 16th and 17th centuries as a unified system integrating the plantation production of the Brazilian coast. and the slave “factories” of Angola into a single Lusophone archipelago. Matory (1999), meanwhile has pointed to the dialogic nature of modern Afro-Atlantic culture on the Latin American rim, based on the comings and goings of Brazilian and Cuban returnees to West African port cities in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This phenomenon is the subject of Guran (1999) and the new edited volume by Mann and Bay (2001). In recent studies of Brazilian popular music and ethnicity, there have been some isolated references to the impact of early samba history of contacts with the music scene of 1920s Europe ( Vianna 1999), while new work on the cultural impact of globalisation(e.g. Lipsitz 1994), and the role of black Diaspora cultural politics ( e.g. the Lusophone African independence movements and Caribbean Rastafarianism) in the emergence of a new black consciousness movement in Bahia, has encouraged a more transnational approach to contemporary Afro-Brazilian culture, as in Perrone and Dunn(2001). The latter study remains essentially concerned with the national context, however, and there is a yet no systematic work that takes the Lusophone Black Atlantic as its frame of analysis, or which examines in an integrated fashion the multi-directional flows of diasporic cultures and the dialogues between them. It is this gap which the “Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic” project is intended to explore and fill, in order to redefine the disciplinary map for our own immediate field, as well as adding a vital new dimension to the work under way elsewhere in Diaspora and Transatlantic studies. The two and a half day conference aims to discuss the advantages, possibilities and even the limitations of proposing the Lusophone Black Atlantic as a space of research. The sessions will seek to address common questions and comparative perspectives (e.g. why the “Black Atlantic” rather than “Afro-American cultures”, or the “lusophone Triangle”: the usefulness of concepts such as miscegenation, hibridity, creolisation, syncretism: the specificity of the Lusophone context in considering racial politics) that may bring together ongoing research in different disciplinary fields, geographical areas and historical periods. ProgrammeTHURSDAY 10 MARCH9.15 Registration 9.45: Welcome and Introduction James Dunkerley, Institute for the Study of the Americas, and David Treece, Centre for the Study of Brazilian Culture and Society, King’s College London. 10.00: SESSION 1: HISTORICITIES AND CONTINUITIES
2.30: SESSION 2: THE PORTUGUESE EMPIRE AND THE ATLANTIC
FRIDAY 11 MARCH10.00: SESSION 3: MIGRATIONS AND IDENTITIES
2.30: SESSION 4: HYBRIDITIES AND MULTICULTURALISM
Conference: The Portuguese Atlantic: Africa, Cape Verde, Brazil and the U.S.Date :6 July – 10 July 2005 Venue: Mindelo, São Vicente, Cape Verde Islands The Conference held at King’s in September 2004, entitled Creole societies in the Portuguese and Dutch colonial empires, focussed on the emergence of creole societies in Africa and the Indian Ocean. The Conference proposed for Cape Verde next year will shift the focus to the Atlantic It will be called The Portuguese Atlantic: Africa, Cape Verde the US and Brazil The historiography of the last forty years has shown clearly that Africa, far from being an isolated backwater, cut off from human development, has been a crossroads, mediating contact with a wide range of peoples and cultures. One result of this has been the emergence of contact societies where Africans met, absorbed and engaged with others from outside the continent. Most – but not all – of these societies were involved in trade and most developed distinctive characteristics as a result of this encounter. Many were highly mixed brokerage societies like those of the West and East African islands and coastal regions; others, such as those of the Zambesi prazos were more territorially based, while the Coloureds of South Africa were pastoralists or developed as artisans and wage earners within a white dominated colonial society. What links these disparate groups is that they and their contemporaries often stressed the mixed nature of their cultural heritage and maintained ties, however tenuous, across the seas. The Conference will therefore also look at the connections these societies maintained with the African diaspora(s) in the Atlantic and the Americas. Could this be called creolisation? The debate is a lively one with many Africanists hostile to the use of such a term. Yet ‘hybridity’ and ‘creole identities’ are widely accepted terms and receive much attention in the context of the Caribbean and America (North and South); they form a significant strand of the ‘new’ British imperial history and in the development of the concept of a ‘shadow empire’ in Portuguese historiography. In a wider context the Conference will also make a significant contribution to the urgent discussions – academic and practical – on identity, nationalism, ethnicity and political power which are of critical importance in the twenty-first century. With some particular exceptions, this debate has largely taken place without much input from Africanists, as if the continent had little to contribute to the discussion of such issues. This Conference aims to fill this gap by exploring African ‘creole’ societies and the communities with which they maintained contacts in the Americas. Questions such as how these societies developed, how issues of identity were negotiated and re-negotiated, what roles they played in economic, political, cultural and social histories of Africa, the US and Brazil and what lasting impact they have had, will be central to the Conference. The concept of a ‘Black Atlantic’ will be extended from its original focus on the Anglophone world to the Lusophone Atlantic and will look at the economic, cultural and social contacts maintained between Africa, the United States and Brazil, often using the ‘creole’ islands of the Atlantic as the conduits of migration and cultural exchange. The Conference will result in a volume which will contribute to the debate on development and cultural exchange in the Atlantic community and on the historic links between the creole societies and the United States and Brazil. Contact details: Those interested should contact Professor M.Newitt, Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, King’s college, Strand, London WC2R 2LS: tel 020 7848 1827: e mail malyn.newitt@kcl.ac.uk |
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