African and Afrodiasporic Mobilities and Identities
Working Paper 95/2011: Feiras Livres e Mercados no Espaço Lusófono: Perspectivas de um estudo em psicologia social
Abstract:
This communication proposes a reflection on the research methods to be applied in the study “Feiras Livres e Mercados no Espaço Lusófono: Perspectivas de um estudo em psicologia social”. The interest in the field is due, in the first place, to the type of study to be carried out and to the singularities of the proposed project, such as the fact that it will be carried out in the cities of Bissau, Praia and São Paulo, involving researchers from different areas of science and propose a field work with the subjects. Fairs and markets constitute the empirical objective of this study, presenting themselves as important universes of human activity and survival that mark the urbanity of capitals in the Portuguese-speaking space. The aim is to study the components and conditions for building a work base that will enable workers in markets and fairs to generate income through work in micro-enterprises. The study must identify and describe the material and psychosocial conditions that made it possible to become a worker in these free markets, building and acquiring the knowledge to be included in this work activity.
Quotation:
Évora, Iolanda. 2011. “Feiras Livres e Mercados no Espaço Lusófono: Perspectivas de um estudo em psicologia social”. Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão – CEsA Documentos de Trabalho nº 95-2011.
Hip-hop em Cabo Verde: rap e representação do espaço público na cidade da Praia
Abstract:
In Hip-hop em Cabo Verde: rap e representação do espaço público na cidade da Praia, the author studies how, despite the strong link with Portugal and the existence in that country of numerous rap groups composed of Cape Verdeans or descendants of Cape Verdeans, the hip-hop produced there is practically ignored and very little consumed by young people, particularly those from the periphery, to the detriment of the culture of North American black ghettos, known through the audiovisual flows of the digital era. Young people all over the world are seen as a risk factor, an association that is particularly patent in the modern discourse on security, especially in an era in which a part of young people associate themselves with street gangs, revealing “the failure of the expected reproduction of the support mechanisms of an expansive and optimistic capitalism”, which provides the so-called “Welfare State”. Thus, in the face of a feeling of juvenile unease, evidenced in some actions that destabilize the social order and the “Creole morabeza”, it becomes mandatory that the institutions that protect this population layer control them, reprogramming them institutionally, thus building a State Social Service.
Quotation:
Lima, R.W. (2022). Hip-hop em Cabo Verde: rap e representação do espaço público na cidade da Praia: In Territórios, cidades e identidades africanas em movimento. Andréia Moassab, Marina Berthet (Orgs.), 119-133. Foz do Iguaçu: EDUNILA, 2022. ISBN: 978-65-86342-32-1
África, o berço da modernidade: por uma visão pós-colonial da modernidade e do território
Abstract:
In África, o berço da modernidade: por uma visão pós-colonial da modernidade e do território. In Territórios, cidades e identidades africanas em movimento, the author starts by taking a brief look at what is conventionally called modernity and what constitutes the substratum on which the “West” anchors itself for a triumphant and universalist autonarrative. Various authors, mainly from the mid-eighties onwards, have sought to demystify the origins of Western civilisation and modernity, most notably the three volumes of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987/1991/2006), by Martin Gardiner Bernal.2 Other authors have followed in Bernal’s footsteps to some extent, one of them being the philosopher and historian Enrique Dussel with his work Política de La Liberación: Historia Mundial y Crítica [Liberation Policy: World History and Critique] (2007): World History and Critique] (2007), in which, situated in the field of postcolonial theory, he argues that Hellenocentrism is the father of Eurocentrism and that, given that the so-called “Greek miracle” by the German Romantics of the eighteenth century does not exist, this means having to start “anew” the history of political philosophy. To this end, he considers it essential to redefine the beginning of modernity. It is worth pointing out that it is “postmodernity” – called the historical period that seeks to overcome, or surpasses, modernity – that will give rise, in Western academia and its satellites, not only to a debate about the “postmodern condition” – or about its being the “cultural logic of late capitalism” – but also about the “vision” of modernity itself. Although many prefer expressions other than “postmodern”, or change their preference -such as Zygmunt Bauman, who starts talking about “liquid modernity”, or Gilles Lipovetsky, who prefers the term “hypermodernity”, or others who talk about “incomplete modernity”, or “late modernity” or “alternative modernities”-, in essence they do not put the emphasis on a critical analysis of the hegemonic Anglo-Saxon periodisation of modernity.
Quotation:
Barros-Varela, O. (2022). África, o berço da modernidade: por uma visão pós-colonial da modernidade e do território. In Territórios, cidades e identidades africanas em movimento. Andréia Moassab, Marina Berthet (Orgs.), 11-31. Foz do Iguaçu: EDUNILA, 2022. ISBN: 978-65-86342-32-1
De escravos a indígenas: O longo processo de instrumentalização dos africanos (séculos XV-XX)
Abstract:
De Escravos a Indígenas: o Longo Processo de Instrumentalização dos Africanos (Séculos XV-XX), which brings together a set of texts written over forty years and dispersed in publications of diverse nature, not always easily accessible, aims to contribute to a renewal of historiography on the relations between Portugal and Africa, in the specific field of the forms of instrumentalisation of Africans carried out by the Portuguese for almost five centuries. A long process, whose internal nature proved capable of metamorphosis and reconversion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ensuring the continuity of the violent ‘use’ of African populations, resorting to a new classificatory apparatus – savages, indigenous, assimilated – aimed at keeping Africans within the sphere of Portuguese domination, contributing to legitimising their enslavement and fixing distorting interpretations of History.
If a first line of study aims to review the history of slavery and slave trafficking and their ideologies in spaces of Portuguese ‘occupation’ like Angola, a second line of study privileges iconographic documents as historical sources, emphasizing their historical and informative dimension. Finally, the third line of this study seeks to highlight the evolution of the process of Portuguese instrumentalisation of Africans, which resorts to unprecedented classificatory categories – savage, indigenous, assimilated – and to practices that emerge from the slave labour of the past to ensure the colonial exploitation of African populations.
Value judgments, commodification, objectification, exploitation, ridiculing of African men fabricated Portuguese imaginaries that reduced the black/African to slavery, the savage/indigenous to lazy, thieving and drunk, the assimilated/’civilised’ to a ridiculous and negative copy of the white/Portuguese, enshrining the inferiorization of Africans, and in the same movement, glorifying the Portuguese ‘race’, hierarchizing the humanities and valuing the dimension and nature of the Portuguese actions, first slave-owning and then colonialist, that have left their mark on Portuguese society to this day.
Quotation:
Henriques, Isabel C., De Escravos a Indígenas: o Longo Processo de Instrumentalização dos Africanos (Séculos XV-XX), Lisboa, Ed. Caleidoscópio, 2019.
Historical Guide to an African Lisbon
Abstract:
Lisbon, a city of as many valleys and hills as there are myths surrounding its history and the people who invented it, stretches along the Tagus, where the river ends its course through Iberian land and plunges into the Atlantic Ocean. Lisbon was born on the hill of São Jorge Castle, where a Bronze Age settlement left its traces, which crossed with many other marks engraved by Greeks, Phoenicians, Lusitanians, Romans, Visigoths, Arabs, Jews and Christians. A long road of people and cultures, of stories and legends, of gods and heroes who, like Ulysses the mythical founder of the city – Olisipo – which owes its name to him, built and rebuilt this urban space. The aim of Historical Guide to an African Lisbon, XV-XXI Century is to show Lisbon’s Africanness, dispersed in a plurality of memories and immaterial and invisible traces in the days in which we live. History tells us about the settlement and life of thousands of Africans who for centuries took part in the process of building the Portuguese national fact. Travelling through the city, armed with historical knowledge, we are surprised by the vigorous African presence that invaded all spaces of Lisbon society, we reconstruct a hidden Lisbon, submerged by a centuries-old prejudice that still dominates our collective imagination and we understand, with greater clarity, not only behaviours, values, practices that remain in urban daily life, but also the constant reinventions of Portuguese and African identities, present in the country.
Quotation:
Castro Henriques, I. (2021). « Historical Guide to an African Lisbon, XV-XXI Century», versão revista e actualizada, Lisboa, Edições Colibri, 2021.
Manuel Viegas Guerreiro: «Ovakwankala (Bochimanes) e Ovakwanyama (Bantos): aspectos do seu convívio». Uma interpretação histórica.
Abstract:
The research and study of hunter-gatherer societies developed significantly within the framework of a mainly neo-evolutionist social and cultural anthropology, particularly Anglo-American, in the 1950s and 1960s. Africa constituted a privileged space for this type of study which sought to highlight the intimate relations of these populations with the environment in which they lived and on which they depended, but also the consequences, on their evolution, of the development and consolidation of the European colonial systems, which forced changes in their territorial framework of circulation, leading them to situations at the limits of survival. In a more precise manner, in the intellectual context of the time, linked to values and principles which marked the valorisation of nature, knowledge of ecosystems, the advance of ecology – in particular American cultural-ecology or ecological anthropology – as a way of thinking about the world and humanity’s relations with the surrounding spaces, there was also a multiplication of studies seeking to underline the virtues and benefits of these societies, which were called the first societies of abundance (Marshall Sahlins, 1968). But the history of these societies always remained silent, the written documents were fragile and knowledge of these human groups was based on the idea of a long, multi-secular path marked by the constancy of their acts, their practices and their lives. This absence of movement was incompatible with the notion of change, which is indispensable to the evolution – and therefore the history – of societies. The very notion of “society of abundance” referred to the recognition of a supposed “wealth” of hunter-gatherers, who found in the surrounding nature everything they needed to live in a comfortable situation, which solved their food needs, dispensed with relations with other peoples, and guaranteed free time and rest, which easily allowed them to carry out their social and religious practices. This was an idyllic vision that referred back to previous historical times, almost without movement, and to the absence of significant transformation and change processes in their historical situation. In Manuel Viegas Guerreiro: «Ovakwankala (Bochimanes) e Ovakwanyama (Bantos): aspectos do seu convívio». Uma interpretação histórica. Isabel Castro Henriques comments on the homonymous study conducted by Manuel Viegas Guerreiro.
Quotation:
“Castro Henriques, I. (2021). «Manuel Viegas Guerreiro – Ovakwankala (Bochimanes) e Ovakwanyama (Bantos): aspectos do seu convívio. Uma interpretação histórica. Lisbon, Newsletter Fundação Manuel Viegas Guerreiro, no 27, julho-setembro 2021, pp. 10-16.”
As (im) pertinências do método. Metodologia participativa e o estudo sobre a Afrodescendência em Portugal
Abstract:
The announcement of the Decade of African Descendants (2015-2024) by the UN, drew attention to the presence of African descendants in Europe, including in Portugal, as part of the contemporary social configuration of the continent. However, the focus on these people has been sustained, above all, in theories and representations of subalternity and exclusion that do not recognize them as new political subjects in a Europe that is no longer black and white. These politically hybrid subjects, in the historical and cultural sense, bring theoretical-epistemological and methodological challenges to the social sciences, since their visions, paradigms and ways of living escape the traditional lenses of the approaches that associate them with immigrants or refugees. We propose that in approaching the subject of Afrodescendence, method is central and determinant of the outcomes, ethical function and meaning of social research on emerging contemporary subjects. We argue in favour of participatory methodology, reflecting on its pertinence in a context where the people in the researched situation are critical subjects in their fields of intervention/action who reject being reduced to mere objects of study. We analyse the processes of negotiation in the field concluding on the contribution of this project to the dialogue between academics and the afrodescendant collectives. As (im)pertinências do método. Metodologia participativa e o estudo sobre a Afrodescendência em Portugal is inserted in the debate on the democratization of knowledge, sustained, in particular, by critical perspectives that are based on studies on emerging contemporary subjects.
Quotation:
Évora, Iolanda. “As (im)pertinências do método. Metodologia participativa e o estudo sobre a Afrodescendência em Portugal”, In: Yao, Jean-Arséne, Victorien Lavou Zoungbo et Luis Mancha San Esteban, eds. Forthcoming. Representations collectives croisées: Afriques, Amériques et Caraibes. Xix-xxi siècles. III GRELAT. Actas do Colóquio. Madrid: UAH Editora, 167-176. ISBN:978-84-18254-12-3.
Mobilidades Contemporâneas no Contexto Pós-Colonial: Mbembe, Glissant e Mattelart
Abstract:
Taking up again the idea of subject derived from the reading of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, concepts and worldviews will be mobilized that contribute to better understand contemporary mobilities. Reference is made to the process, the organization and the conditions in which current human mobilities are carried out to establish relationships between displacement, identity processes and narratives of belonging to places. In Mobilidades Contemporâneas no Contexto Pós-Colonial: Mbembe, Glissant e Mattelart we seek to observe this problematic from a paradigm interested in the possible positive effects, in the short and long term, of a change in the narrative on the international mobility of people. Armand Mattelart analyses, from the space of the city, the struggles of peoples and groups that question previously demarcated territories. To make his declared utopia viable, Édouard Glissant proposes the “creolisation of the contemporary world”, or the “All-World”, starting from the will born in the Caribbean archipelago, or rather, in mestizo America. Achille Mbembe, speaking of our condition of passers-by, of our common situation of vulnerability in the world, proposes a thought of passage, of crossing and circulation in which to inhabit is not to belong, refusing classifications that immobilise, in praise of an ethic that considers translation, misunderstandings and conflicts, recovering the body, the face, the word.
Quotation:
“Kowalewski, Daniele, Schilling, Flávia, Magalhães, Giovanna Modé, & Évora, Iolanda. (2019). Mobilidades Contemporâneas no Contexto Pós-Colonial: Mbembe, Glissant e Mattelart. Lua Nova: Revista de Cultura e Política, (108), 137-156. Epub November 28, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1590/0102-137156/108“
Diáspora Cabo-Verdiana: Temas em debate
Abstract:
The idea of this collection originates from the interest in retaining in the same work important themes that are currently under debate and that the social sciences have been addressing regarding the Cape Verdean diaspora. From specific theoretical fields and their own empirical work, the authors choose the Cape Verdean diaspora society as their object, exploring dynamics that together make up the Cape Verdean diasporic space and describe the complexity inherent to its constitution. We aimed at gathering contributions that are not only concerned with mapping the current global dispersion of Cape Verdeans (including the second third resettlements in locations such as, for instance, the Schengen area, after the insertions of the first Cape Verdeans in Europe) but, above all, with deciphering the complex processes of diasporisation. We hope that Diáspora Cabo-verdiana: temas em debate will contribute to reinforce the attention of social scientists regarding the ways in which the Cape Verdean diaspora is constituted in temporal and spatial terms, the engagement of communities among themselves and with Cape Verde, knowing that this, in turn, also experiences, in its temporal and spatial structure, new ways of remembering, imagining and engaging its diaspora today.
Quotation:
Évora, Iolanda (coord.) /2016). Diáspora Cabo-verdiana: temas em debate. Lisboa: CEsA – Centro de Estudos sobre África, Ásia e América Latina.
Djunta-mon em Três Tempos: Pós-independência, imigração e transnacionalismo. Aspectos da experiência associativa cabo-verdiana
Abstract:
Djunta-mon em três tempos: pós-independência, imigração e transnacionalismo. Aspectos da experiência associativa cabo-verdiana focuses on voluntary associations and discusses the material and psychosocial conditions of membership and participation of members. These aspects are analyzed from the point of view of the members of cooperatives in the rural area of the island of Santiago, created in the post-independence period, and of Cape Verdean immigrant associations in Portugal. In Santiago, we identified both singular forms of appropriation of the official ideological base and governmental objectives, as well as cultural permanences that, through practices such as djunta-mon, ensure the protection of social identities and allow familiarity and subjective control of this social practice. . In immigration, spontaneous associations propose to maintain identity, promote social inclusion or solve common problems and needs and reflect the heterogeneity, social cleavages and class divisions of origin that are reproduced in immigration. Currently, formal demands for greater rigor and technical and human competence in its functioning seem to weaken spontaneous and voluntary adhesion and the djunta-mon. At the same time, it questions the traditional role of these associations in the face of changes in immigration with the inclusion of new profiles such as transnational migrants. We examine the adaptability of this collective strategy, indicating that in the past, in the present and in the face of the possibility of a transnational associative practice, the use of the traditional djunta mon adapted to the lived context, ensures the maintenance of the strong network of reciprocity and sociability essential to survival and success. of the associations.
Quotation:
Évora, Iolanda. 2011. “Djunta-mon em três tempos: pós-independência, imigração e transnacionalismo. Aspectos da experiência associativa cabo-verdiana”. Comunicação apresentada no X Congresso Luso-Afro-Brasileiro de Ciências Sociais, Sessão Temática Desenvolvimento, Políticas Públicas e Terceiro Sector
