Testimonies

African-European Narratives invites personalities from various European countries, with different backgrounds and profiles to offer their testimony about the interplay of African and European cultures in contemporary Europe. These short interviews or conversations will be presented as video registers and transcripted excerpts.

Participant Entities are welcome to gather testimonies within their own region or country to be published in theAfrican-European Narratives web platform.

Afro-European Cartography of Culture, Language and Arts

The Afro-European Cartography of Culture, Language and Arts is a research and publishing initiative of the African-European Narrative project. The goal of this publication is to contribute to the mapping of the Afro-European cultural interplay, to promote the research on it, and to provide greater access to the scholarly knowledge related its topics which are highly relevant for contemporary thinking and citizenship.

This project seeks, firstly, to provide a foundation and broaden the field opened up by the collection of stories currently in progress on the African-European Narratives portal, bringing with it more descriptive rigor and widening the possible readings conferred by this collection. The interdisciplinary nature of the compilation will produce a glossary that will broaden the scope of this field of research. Traditionally, a glossary elucidates a set of terms or notes that are appended to a given text. It is understood to be a specialized dictionary presenting a lexicon related to a specific field of knowledge, a particular usage, an academic work, or a linguistic register.  

Such a glossary can, thus, potentially be expanded through the use of open collaborative access, as interested parties can either add new terms and descriptions, or comment on existing entries. Such openness will not preclude the careful selection either of the terms – whose relevance must be agreed upon – or the methodological approach, which must ensure the coherence of the work as a whole. The digital platform will furthermore create an environment that encourages expansion and interconnection among entries. The content will be given a shape similar to that of a map and will be subject to analytical and spatial analysis.  In cyberspace, this cartography will not be projected on the surface of the globe but in a three-dimensional order established by the myriad connections between posts. The platform can, moreover, offer multitudinous links: between text, image, video, audio recordings, etc.

Due to the specific demands of the project, the terms and descriptors will be grouped firstly thematically and only then alphabetically, so that fruitful links might be set up to encourage intratextual readings.

We will end up with sets of interrelated terms. Grouping the material into segments is not intended to decide in advance the methodology or the theoretical focus. The goal is, rather, to closely study the content using critical and theoretical tools capable of evaluating the epistemic features to be reviewed in light of their very relevance. This methodological approach runs counter to the classical one that investigates material based on predetermined categories, starting, in this case, from the unique character of the corpus and going on to investigate the analytical procedures and lend them validity.

As a starting point, the Cartography of Afro-European Culture will approach the data in four ways:

1. Epistemologies: This approach will gather and evaluate the theoretical-critical vocabulary that orients the investigation of colonial and postcolonial contexts, in particular the socio-cultural phenomena arising from them. The major fields of research are: anthropology, postcolonial studies, cultural theory and cultural studies, linguistics, narratology, image theory and visual studies, semiotics, and artistic studies, among others.

2.History and Genealogy: This section will set the historical context of colonialism,  with its unique set of tensions and conflicts that served as a backdrop for the movements, wars, and phenomena that make up the Afro-European relationship (colonies, decolonization, colonial wars, anti-colonial struggles, imperialism, etc). The aim is to bring all the dynamic force of the phenomena and events together, while identifying the processes and features that differentiate them.  The role of history is to discuss naturally heterogeneous and discontinuous phenomena in order to identify and map out the relationships and tensions between them.

3.Cultural Practices and Performativity: This approach will deal with the study of cultural practices and new forms of performativity rooted within communities situated within the Afro-European intercultural dialogue. The aim is to map out the processes of the transubjectivation of identity – the use, practices, customs, activist representations and claims – of communities that are defined by this  common experience. We seek to understand cultural practices and performativity as dynamic processes, imbued with processes of contamination and cultural hybridization that are reflected in corporeality, in the miscegenation of discourse, in the mixing of symbols, in new representations and in the demand for identity.

4.Linguistic Use: A corpus of Afro-European lexical items and of idiosyncratic expressions specific to Afro-European communities will be produced  to illustrate European linguistic diversity. Terms and relevant syntactic formations will also be identified that construct a linguistic ecology capable of altering the monolinguistic notion of identity.

5.Arts and Imaginaries: The mapping out of the colonial and postcolonial imaginaries will result from the analysis of modern and contemporary creative practices. In this section, we seek to identify the invisibilities and ideological stylizations that have shaped colonial imaginaries, as well as the creative practices (inside and outside the art institution) that have led to the emergence of post-colonial representations and imaginaries and to the decoding of some aspects of contemporary art itself. Faced with new cultural histories and geographies as well as with the phenomena arising from globalization, we also seek to question the aftermath of the creative and curatorial strategies of postcolonialism.

Maria Augusta Babo
(Coordinator of the Executive Editorial Committee)

Debate Series

NOVA FCSH – January – June 2019

The Debate Series “, African-European Narratives” focus on the interplay of African and European cultures in today’s Europe, rooted not only in our collective history and memory but also in the life stories of many European citizens.  Valuing public debate and citizenship as main purposes of knowledge production and sharing the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the Nova University of Lisbon will invite a broad differentiated group of citizens to debate Afro-European culture with a particular focus on the Portuguese reality.

Organisation

Project AFRICAN-EUROPEAN NARRATIVES
ICNOVA – Institut of Communication | NOVA FCSH
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Nova University of Lisbon
NEAL – Núcleo de Estudantes Africanos e Lusófonos (AE NOVA FCSH)
NEA – NÚCLEO DE ESTUDANTES AFRICANOS (AE FCT-UNL)

info@africaneuropeanarratives.pt | http://africaneuropeanarratives.eu

Free entrance