Call for papers | Vol. 41 | Historical reparations: Destabilising constructions from the colonial past | Closed
Editors: Vítor de Sousa (CECS, University of Minho, Portugal), Sheila Khan (CECS, University of Minho, Portugal) and Pedro Schacht Pereira (Ohio State University, USA)
The contestation of ethnocentrism by post-colonial critique, among other consequences, has questioned various panegyrics of memory in public space. Concepts whose mission was to confer stability on the social world are therefore being questioned today and are becoming increasingly obsolete. In this specific case, there is the idea of the museum and other manifestations in the public space, such as statuary. In addition, issues considered to be fractious, such as systemic racism, the survival of old colonial logics of racialisation and racial surveillance, and the struggles for gender equality, are adding up against the status quo.
The study of the past serves as an ethical, moral and civic stance to reflect on the permanence of old logics of coloniality that permeate current social, political, historical and cultural contexts. From the experience of globalisation, we realise that the contemporary world is interdependent and that globalisation, even with all the criticisms associated with it, allows other modes of relationship, sustained, for example, in an alterglobalist logic (Hardt & Negri, 2019). In this sense, it is relevant to highlight the argument that the world is neither static nor historically homogeneous. The mindset of Western modernity underpinned its ideology, through hegemony, violence, racialisation and racial surveillance, on this premise: to flatten the world of human diversity according to criteria that excluded all those who did not fit into the grand narrative and grammar of Western progress, civilisation and development. This historical and ontological erasure has condemned thousands and thousands of human beings to backwardness. No latitude in the world has escaped this praxis, with Western modernity being tentacular and agile in its mechanisms and devices of domination, appropriation and regulation.
The confrontation with the colonial system until post-colonialism was a painful, bruising and tortuous path, requiring an exercise of collective memory duty. Today, to understand the legacies of this modern coloniality, it is relevant to place at the heart of academic and civil debate the multiple voices and narratives. Those will contribute to a more profound and comprehensive mapping of the mechanisms of the colonial past still active in our contemporaneity. The memories, narratives, manifestos, social activism and the debates around recognition and historical reparation, mirrored in public and media communication processes, have become, from a cultural and political point of view, fertile ground and a commitment to historical introspection. Challenging battles are fought for the construction of a more just, equitable and repairing narrative.
This volume of Comunicação e Sociedade focuses on the rich interdisciplinary commitment to an attentive and intelligent dialogue between the legacies of coloniality and the current processes of historical reparation in various dimensions of human historicity. With this approach, we intend to invite scholars from various parts of the world to take up this urgent and necessary challenge for the memory of future generations and the problematisation of communication phenomena.
Paper proposals should address one or more of the following topics:
- Legacies of coloniality. New mappings on racialisation processes and racial surveillance;
- From coloniality as opposition to interculturality;
- Luso-tropicalism and its current repercussions on Portuguese society;
- Decolonisation of museums, statues and other public monuments;
- Fetishism and abolitionism;
- Art, memory and post-colonial literature;
- The role of post-memory as a duty of memory;
- Historical reparation. Memory, slavery and race;
- Historical reparation. Humanistic genetics and race;
- Black Lives Matter as a reparations movement;
- Curatorial artivism: how can organised groups or individuals offer narratives towards reinterpreting colonial public statuary and other equipment?
- Digital networks and intercultural dynamics;
- Digitisation of cultures and arts;
- Political confrontations in the media space: Nationalism and populism vs historical reparation;
- New tools of coloniality: Big Data and Algorithms;
- Media discourses, memory and transformation.
KEY DATES
(New) deadline for submission: December 2 2021
Notification of acceptance: January 21 2022
Deadline for the complete and translated: March 18 2022
Publication: June 2022
LANGUAGE
Papers can be submitted in English or Portuguese. At the peer-review process, the authors of selected articles should ensure the translation of their article. The editors shall have the final decision on the publication of the article.
EDITING AND SUBMISSION
Comunicação e Sociedade is an open-access academic journal, operating according to demanding standards of the peer-review system, and operates on a double-blind peer-review process. After submission, each paper will be distributed to two reviewers. previously invited to evaluate it according to its academic quality, originality and relevance to the objectives and scope of the theme of this issue of the journal.
Originals should be submitted through the journal's website. When accessing Comunicação e Sociedade for the first time, you must register before submitting your article (instructions to register here).
Refer to the guidelines for authors here.
For further information, please contact: comunicacaoesociedade@ics.uminho.pt
References
Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2019). Empire, twenty years on. New Left Review, 120, 67-92.
