The Permanent Seminar of Post-Colonial Studies will take place on 25 February, at 17h00, on the theme “Rethinking the meanings and boundaries of the imperial and the colonial”. The event will be attended by Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, from the University of Coimbra, and José Pedro Monteiro, from the Communication and Society Research Centre.
The last twenty years have witnessed a substantial reorientation in the ways of thinking and investigating historically and historiographically the colonial past, an aspect that is not always properly understood and integrated in public debates about colonialism and its contemporary legacies. Part of this renewal is tributary to transformations of a methodological and analytical nature that resulted from a greater commitment and investment in questioning methodological nationalism, namely from new international, transnational and global approaches to the study of the past. These dynamics have generated important scientific debates and innovations around, for example, the historical intersections between internationalism and modern imperialism, or about the international, transnational and inter-perial dynamics that have shaped the various trajectories of colonialism and political decolonizations.
In this presentation, we will attempt to map these disciplinary developments, signalling their potential, but also their risks. We will do so by focusing on two particular domains that are particularly illuminating in this regard: 1) histories of colonial development; 2) the formation and evolution of a universal human rights regime and struggles for social reform and political self-determination. In both cases, an attempt will be made to articulate the new international research on European colonial empires with studies on the Portuguese empire in particular.
Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo is an Associate Professor in History at the University of Coimbra (Portugal), Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Department of History, European Studies, Archaeology and Arts. He is also a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (UC) and a Professor and scientific co-coordinator of the PhD programme in Heritage of Portuguese Influence (III/CES-UC). His research interests focus on the global and comparative history of imperialism and colonialism (18th – 20th centuries) and on international and transnational history. He has published regularly, in Portugal and abroad, in leading publishers and journals. Recently, he co-authored History(s) of the Present (Tinta-da-China/Público, 2020) and co-edited Internationalism, Imperialism and the Formation of the Contemporary World (Palgrave, 2017), The Empires of the International (Almedina, 2020) and Visions of Empire (Tinta-da-China, 2021). He coordinates the international project The worlds of (under)development: processes and legacies of the Portuguese colonial empire in a comparative perspective (1945-1975) and is co-responsible investigator of the international project Humanity Internationalized: Cases, dynamics, comparisons (1945-1980), both funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia. He is co-editor of the collections História & Sociedade (Edições 70) and The Portuguese-Speaking World: Its History, Politics, and Culture (Sussex Academic, United Kingdom).
José Pedro Monteiro is a researcher at the Communication and Society Research Centre, University of Minho, having gained his PhD in History, at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, in 2017. In his research path, he has been cross-studying the fields of international history and imperial and colonial history. He has, over the years, published books and articles on these themes. Among others, in 2017, he co-edited Internationalism, Imperialism and the Formation of the Contemporary World and, in 2018, he published Portugal and the Question of Forced Labour: An Empire under Scrutiny (1944-1962). His monograph The Internationalisation of the “Native” Labour Question in Portuguese Late Colonialism (1945-1965) will soon be released. He is currently coordinating the project Humanity Internationalized: Cases, Dynamics, Comparisons (1945-1980), financed by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia.
The event will be held via Zoom.
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