International Congress Politics and Culture in Colonial Periodical Press
CALL FOR PANELS
In the sequence of the constitution of modern European empires of transcontinental vocation, modern colonialism and anticolonialism were structuring in the configuration of contemporary cultural and political ideas and in the complexification of the ideas of culture and politics.
In the conceptual debate of the last decades it has been emphasized the reality of Empires, not only colonial, as constitutive of local nets and hierarchies, and as promoter of a multiplication of congregating centers inside and outside Europe. Such perspective has promoted a new attention to empires as physical spaces of mobility and circulation of people, technologies, knowledges and ideas, as well as to the transfiguring and creative dimensions of such mobility and circulation. Without diluting the unequal relations inherent to the colonial reality, such approaches allow less Eurocentric historiographic approaches, more attentive to the diversity of agents and intellectual sources of thought about the construction of modernity. The ‘provincialization’ of colonialist Europe, cannot but have implications in the way imperial metropoles are looked at, by including them more clearly in the ‘colonial world’ and by viewing them as spaces of confluence and transit of people and debates, in a movement constitutive of their reality.
In this theoretical frame, it is underlined the necessity to reevaluate the place of periodical press in the mentioned conceptual configurations and dynamics. It was in the periodical press that intellectuals mainly expressed, debated and saw debated, ideas in defense of colonial regimes, as much as critics to colonialism, which increasingly developed into openly anticolonial discourses. Defending the theoretical-methodological potential of the concept ‘Colonial Periodical Press’, which already structures a transnational network of researchers, the promoters of the Congress in the concept newspapers, magazines, reviews, bulletins, annals, published in the colonies; similar titles published in the European metropolis dedicated to thinking colonial matters, or in which such matters are essential to internal debates or that deserve specific spaces; titles published in non-colonial or postcolonial spaces dedicated to colonial matters.
The present Congress, opened to the reality of the different modern Colonial Empires, without excluding other approaches aims in particular:
- A theoretical debate about the concept of Colonial Periodical Press, namely concerting its structuring and differentiating elements;
- The role of this press in the constitution of the political;
- The concept of public sphere viewed at the local, intercolonial and/or imperial plans;
- The languages of such press and the languages of historiography;
- Cultural press, idea(s) of culture and the construction of cultural imaginaries;
- Scientific press and colonial science(s);
- Role of the press in the creation of print local literatures and of literary cultures;
- Colonial, imperial and transimperial communication;
- Colonial periodical press and vaster editorial projects:
- Liberty, censorship and persecution;
- Colonialism and anticolonialism in such press;
- Intersections between technological development and circulation of contents in this press;
- Constitution of virtual archives of colonial periodical press
Only proposals written in Portuguese and/or English will be accepted.
Oral presentation may be made in the following languages: Portuguese, English, French or Spanish but to facilitate communication among the participants, power point presentations should be written in Portuguese and/or English.
The organization is working to support the coming of some researchers from African Countries of Portuguese Expression, India and East Timor with accepted communication proposals and lack of local institutional support for participation in scientific events. This support will be dependent on budget availability.
Call for panels closes at 15.10.2016