January 1, 2022 to December 31, 2024

36 months

The objective of this project is to analyse the poetical-literary configurations of resistance as shown in the literary and artistic work of women authors published in the Luso-African-Brazilian space during the 21st century. Resistance as a driving force for performance and the literary activity emerges as a consequence of the awareness of the worldwide inequalities, being them of gender, racial or economic, among others. As far as gender inequality is concerned, and though this issue has evolved positively from the 20th century, it is far from being mitigated. According to statistics published by the United Nations, for example, the numbers of women holding seats in national Parliaments vary from 13,73% (S. Tome and Príncipe) and 39,60% (Mozambique), and the numbers of the other Luso-African-Brazilian countries are within this range. Women’s participation in the workforce in these countries ranges between 28,8% (S. Tome and Príncipe) and 78,1% (Mozambique). The inclusion of Social Inclusion and Citizenship in thematic Research and Development Agendas outlined by the Foundation for Science and Technology, that showcase its commitment to knowledge and science, as defined by the Ministers’ Council in 2016, also conveys inequality as a pressing issue This project takes writing as resistance and gives visibility to literary and artistic works that react against the various forms of gender inequality. Discussing these works as reflexes of the prevailing gender inequality and, more specifically, the literary strategies used to represent forms of resistance is a way to contribute to the promotion of an improved social inclusion and citizenship. The Luso-African-Brazilian space has recently been explored in Rendeiro & Lupati (Eds) (2019) by a few members of the team of this project, with a particular focus on the contemporary production in visual arts, cinema, music and literature, pinpointing the specificities and relating with its historical and social background. However, that project did not focus on women’s writing. Hence, this team hopes to shed light on the representation of the ‘common’ in the experience of women authors in the Luso-African-Brazilian space by taking a comparative and intersectional approach. Therefore, this project analyses the artistic-literary works by Portuguese, Brazilian and Portuguese-speaking African women authors, comparing white, Black, afrodescendant, gypsy and indigenous gazes and voices that resist the prevailing structural order in the Luso-African-Brazilian space, identifying the specificity of the common artistic experience of recent cultural and political structures that gather peripheral women who structure their literary projects as resistance, namely at times of adversity, as shown in their artistic and literary production during the pandemic. By taking the poetical and literary configurations of resistance in women’s writing as the centre of research, this project also discusses the influence of the post-memory of colonialism as a reflection of the memory of the gender inequality that persists in the wider Luso-African-Brazilian community as a multicultural space. This project that has the participation of researchers with published work in the area of gender, periphery and resistance, focusses on the publication of material on resistance as an artistic-literary representation, in order to a) analyse the production of signifiers that emerge from the locus of enunciation of women in works by Portuguese, Brazilian and Portuguese-speaking African women authors that continued to publish after the implementation of the independence; b) analyse the production of signifiers that emerge from the locus of enunciation of women in works by Portuguese, Brazilian and Portuguesespeaking African women authors that started to publish decades after the implementation the independence in the Portuguese-speaking African countries, in order to establish the legacy of the preceding women authors and how it is renovated; c) contribute to the literary history in the Luso-African-Brazilian space, ensuring the visibility of female authorship; d) mapping the emergence of artistic-literary and social female activism that articulates gender and race and the ways it responds to a structural order that relegates these voices to the periphery, ensuring their visibility.

Principal Contractor: Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL)
Participating Institution: Centro de Estudos Sociais (CES)

Inês Nascimento Rodrigues