Paper short abstract:

Focusing on Lagos, Nigeria, as a contextual site of an African polis, this paper provides a critical interrogation of the dialectical nature of art in postcolonial deconstruction and transformation of urban territorial space.

Paper long abstract:

The increasingly acrimonious debates on the dimensions, strategies and imperatives of decolonization tended to be limited by the less attention to the question of the roles of art in decolonizing urban space, planning and urban sustainability. Focusing on Lagos, Nigeria, as a contextual site of an African polis, this paper provides a critical interrogation of the dialectical nature of art in postcolonial deconstruction and transformation of urban territorial space. Art is a decolonial tool of contesting the power relations underpinning the urban strategic planning policies. This paper examines how various art forms have been deployed in postcolonial Lagos in reconfiguring and sometimes sustaining the colonial cartographic narratives and public space segregation in Lagos metropolis. Through art resistance, art memory and indigenous aesthetic paradigms, the policy of privatization and instruments of state's coercion in the enforcements of colonial logic of exclusion in urban residential planning in Lagos have been challenged. The supernatural/ontological, communal, historical, relational, functional, and non-alienating aesthetic prisms of African art are theorised in arguing that an actionable framework for decolonizing Lagos and other colonial sites in Africa can be developed to reduce the imperialistic and estranging relationships existing in African polis.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the literary representation and imaginary of Lisbon's urban landscape. Traveling with Lusophone writers and illustrators from the city center to the "margins" of the capital, we hope to offer a complex discussion on the Lisbon postcolonial ethnoscape.

Paper long abstract:

In the context of today's symbolic economy, where cities compete for visibility in the market of global culture, the city of Lisbon has asserted itself as a global city capable of offering a unique tourism experience. This is exemplified in the volume Lisbon Tales and Trails (2018), a pocket-guide promoted by the city's municipality, which assembles the work of twenty Lusophone writers and illustrators. These artists share with the reader their secret, nostalgic, imaginary, historical, lost, underground, dirty or utopian Lisbon. However, even as the reader is encouraged to walk the most unexpected paths in Lisbon and meet the different cities it contains, most of the artists do not include, in their gaze, the outskirts of the Portuguese capital, where social tensions and poor housing conditions exist. The volume also leaves out the postcolonial dimension of Lisbon, which is a key topic for understanding the social and power dynamics of the former center of a long-lasting colonial empire. By contrast, both of these missing aspects are very well depicted in Esse Cabelo (2015) and Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso (2018), two novels by the young Angola-born Portuguese writer Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida. Having Lisbon Tales and Trails as a point of departure and paying particular attention to Almeida's fictional work, this paper aims to address the following question: how is Lisbon's representation on a global stage exposing the complexities and ambiguities that inhabit the city and its metropolitan area, and which are deeply connected with the legacies of the colonial empire?

Paper short abstract:

This presentation is about an observational study of the significant number of parties with African music, rhythms and musicians in Lisbon. It intends to understand how and where they occur and who attends them and why. It will bring the perceptions of the musicians and the attenders.

Paper long abstract:

There is a relatively significant and consistent number of African parties that take place in Lisbon, which musicians are mainly African or African descendants, offering either more traditional concerts or contemporary parties with African rhythms, like "afrobeat". Along those events, the African music - "labeled" due to its identifiable musical structures and for including traditional African musical instruments, such as kora, mbila or balafon - finds a notable popularity, and is being passionately consumed by young public. However, it is not to consider that neither the parties are novelty in Lisbon, nor the incorporation of traditional African instruments. Nevertheless, I found it interesting to comprehend who attends those parties and why, since there is a majority of non-African participants, like native residents of the city, European tourists and African descendants, who seem to find in those parties a place to rediscover their origins. Concomitantly with the eclectic public, it seems that those parties are conquering new geographical spaces, outside the African resident demographical zones. Therefore, the phenomenon can be perceived as a modern way of "decolonization" of Lisbon, a city that tended to circumscribe the African culture to determined spaces and publics, segregating musical styles that today can be combined with no difficulty or strangeness. This investigation, that is not yet initiated, intends to be mainly ethnographic, through the context description of the events. I would also like to understand what moves this public and which perceptions do the musicians have about this popularity, by interviewing both sides and presenting the results at the Congress.

Paper short abstract:

This paper concerns the artistic and cultural protagonism of black Africans and Afro-descendants in the peripheries of Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro. Anarkofunk's music and Chullage's and LBC Soldjah's rap songs show narratives of resistance and represents a decolonized periphery.

Paper long abstract:

This paper highlights the artistic and cultural protagonism of black Africans and Afro-descendants in the peripheries of Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro.

The Afro-Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro and the Africans or Afro-descendants in Lisbon that reside in the urban peripheries, still live the old asymmetric relations of colonial domination, as segregation, submission and poverty. It will be introduced certain artistic manifestations, that show other narratives on the peripheries. In Anarkofunk's music from Rio de Janeiro and in Chullage's and LBC Soldjah's rap songs from Lisbon, the black becomes the active protagonist of the insurgent peripheries and social actor who changes the narratives about these socially depreciated spaces. The black becomes the symbols of this transformation and the peripheries territorialize their metamorphosis. Rap songs by black African and Afrodescendants in Lisbon act as a device for the formation of the suburban black and diasporic identity in the postcolonial society. The Anarkofunk from Rio de Janeiro confers a position of insurgency to the black who turns into the protagonist of struggle and resistance, dynamically confronting colonial, imperialist and prejudiced narratives and seeks the constitution of an autonomous identity.

In this diasporic context, art can reveal itself as a weapon of protest struggling against the past colonial history and still fighting against the present dominant colonial narratives; it becomes a vehicle for carrying out resistance that allow to read the peripheries as potential places for social and political change, as places of decolonization of the knowledge, power and culture.

Paper short abstract:

To review the interdisciplinary relationship of domination, typical of modernity/coloniality & the arts as a tool to legitimize these dynamics. By a decolonial look, we will approach historical, social and political aspects, observing the relations between representation and imaginary construction.

Paper long abstract:

This paper approaches and emphasizes Brazilian black poetry as an epistemic response to the decolonial project. Here, black thought through poetry, is interpreted as contributing to decoloniality thinking, when it proposes a revision of the mode of social organization, when it discusses the transcendence of Eurocentrism, among other disobediences. Modernity / Coloniality, inseparable and hidden under the rhetoric of progress, imposes the unique thought and creates an asymmetry between few legitimate subjects and the constant denial to the thought and construction of other forms of life, reducing the existence of many, to the condition of exploited and worthless. Nonetheless, the subjects and voices subalternized throughout this project of exclusion, have always existed producing knowledge on the frontiers permeated by coloniality. The political characteristic of black art is consolidated as a space where it can finally be represented as a subject, to register the singularity and subjectivity of its historically denied peers. The experience of subjectivity depends on the insertion of the self in its own speech, therefore, literature plays a determining role in the process of emancipation of man. By situating reality, literary discourse can enhance the reading of the dynamics operated in society, being able to register multiple existences, amplify voices historically forgotten by the hegemonic discourse. In addition, we see the possibility of understanding how to accept these discourses can contribute to the decolonial foundation and, especially, to the exercise of otherness.