Important Dates

This panel features papers that examine works of authors and filmmakers that negotiate the urgency of building communities of re-membering in the face of differential diasporic histories and the necessity to recognize subjective peculiarities and diachronic lapses in multiple articulations slave memories and commemorative practices.

The question of commemoration and the duty to remember the Transatlantic slave trade constitutes a key aspect of recent artistic attempts at re-making and re-dynamizing the bonds of a shared heritage between peoples of African ancestry and continental Africans. This is often based on the identification of the Slave Trade as the common Signifier that can serve as a discursive locus for artistic or activist articulation of a supposedly (Pan)Africanist perspective and practice of commemoration. However, such attempts are often met with experiential diversities as a result of the varied trajectories, imbricated histories, personal idiosyncrasies that are often neglected and relegated in the oft-generalized discourse of ‘black experiences’. Thus, due to differential identity formations borne out of transits (understood as movement in time and space), subjects are predisposed to multiple and dynamic perceptions of the imperative and modalities of commemoration, as well as the foregrounding of ethics and aesthetics of memory that cut across Africa and its Latin American Diasporas. With a focus on Francophone, Hispanic and Lusophone African and Afro-descendant authors, this panel invites papers that examine works of authors and filmmakers that negotiate the urgency of building communities of re-membering in the face of differential diasporic histories and the necessity to recognize subjective peculiarities and diachronic lapses in multiple articulations slave memories and commemorative practices.

Conference website: https://ciea11.pt/index.php/en/