Call for papers for the Ibero-American Studies dossier: “Memories of Colonial Violence: Recognizing the past and struggles for the future”

Call for papers for the thematic dossier “Estudos Ibero-Americanos” dedicated to the theme: “Memories of Colonial Violence: Recognizing the past and struggles for the future”, organized by Sheila Khan, a CECS researcher, in partnership with Bruno Sena Martins and Miguel Cardina, both from the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra.

The growing interest in the memory of colonialism has made it increasingly evident that there is a need to confront the legacies of violence installed by modern empires. In this sense, this dossier seeks to gather articles that contribute to a reflection on the current situation of the Portuguese colonial past from a perspective that privileges the weight of the legacies of colonial violence. The aim is, on the one hand, to grasp social reality permeated by the logics that established genocides, slavery, elision of ancestral cultures, colonial wars, displacements, forced labor and all kinds of daily oppression. On the other hand, the dossier is intended to recognize how the present is also, and significantly, the result of anticolonial resistances and struggles that, historically inscribed, contributed to the end of political colonialism and that have bequeathed to the present inspiring narratives of human dignity.

Given these aims, they call for articles that center colonial violence in the crosshairs and confront frames of meaning that are complicit with policies of oblivion and with triumphalist versions of the worlds that colonialism created. Looking at the future from the perspective of the tensions, discriminations and struggles established by the past-present of the Eurocentric, racist and imperial imagination opens a path toward a political imagination renewed and amplified by a civic duty of memory, that is, by an ethical imperative that connects the necessary recognition of the past with the struggles of those who in the future question the legacies of colonial violence.

More information here.