Special issue: WOMANART – Women, arts and dictatorship. The cases of Portugal, Brazil and Portuguese Speaking African Countries
This special issue of Diacrítica will focus on the different strands of analysis developed within the research project WOMANART – Women, arts and dictatorship. The cases of Portugal, Brazil and Portuguese Speaking African Countries (funded by FCT, PTDC/ART-OUT/28051/2017). Coordinated by Ana Gabriela Macedo, the project’s main goal is to make visible the presence of women as resilient creators of alternative aesthetic canons (literary and artistic), which actively challenge and unveil the status quo and hegemonic discourses in those contexts. We aim to reflect on how the dominant ideology marked the female artistic practices and question which were the forms of resistance engendered by women in the enunciated geopolitical contexts, by addressing the following topics: political repression, colonial war, historical silencing, education, gender politics and feminism, domesticity, emigration, exile and diaspora. This project is engaged in a transversal and interartistic dialogue addressing the voices of women artists who actively challenged censorship, mutism and political repression from different generations, geographies and artistic practices and discourses, such as literature, the visual arts, film, documentary, performance and theatre.
We invite scholars and researchers to submit papers addressing (amongst others) the following issues and problematics:
-What were the spaces, creative or otherwise, women were ascribed to in the context of repression and censorship?
- Can we speak of feminism in the arts in the context of dictatorships?
- How did these regimes and their ideological and aesthetic premises frame the relationship of women artists with ideas of modernity and the avant-garde?
- What was the standpoint of women’s struggle in the larger context of the resistance to dictatorships?
- What type of networks and collective forms of resistance did women create between different geographical contexts and did they result in their effective empowerment?
- How are artists, writers, performers and directors working and creating today in the contemporary world, while retrospectively looking at our dictatorial and colonial past through a feminist or gender lens?
NB: This issue of Diacrítica will also feature essays by invitation. Therefore, the organizing committee will select a limited number of essays received through the open call.
Languages accepted: Portuguese, English and French
Deadline for submission of papers: January 15th 2020