Project description
Haunting in indentured labour narratives in African archipelagos
Funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the GHOST project draws on extensive research into indentured narratives – including poetry, prose, painting, cinema, songs, press, and life stories – to explore the cultural history of colonial forced labour (and its afterlives) in Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe. The project examines how and why indentured labour narratives, commonly referred to as contrato (a covert term for forced labour), have evolved over time in these two African archipelagos from the 20th century onwards. GHOST employs the concept of haunting to delve into colonial indentured labour experiences, analysing ghosts and hauntings as spiritual entities, rhetorical tools, and means of marginalisation.
Objective
This project provides the first comprehensive study on the entangled cultural memories of plantation' indentured labour under Portuguese colonialism in Cape Verde and S. Tomé and Príncipe, from the 20th century onwards. GHOST addresses a gap in global plantation studies, predominantly focused on the Americas, by exploring how and why the narratives of indentured labour, known as contrato, change over time in these two African archipelagos. Drawing on original and detailed empirical research, GHOST analysis is based on a diverse set of visual, oral and written sources – among others, literary texts, music, cinema, interviews, newspapers articles, photographs, letters, laws, reports (and other official documentation) – through which the project will trace the multiple and sometimes divergent Cape Verdean and Santomean narratives linked to plantation work and contrato, how they are mobilized, and their changing symbolic and political uses through time. The originality of this project derives from a ground-breaking interdisciplinary approach to colonial indentured labour underdeveloped experiences using the conceptual framework of haunting. It argues for three distinct readings of ghosts and hauntings: as spectral agents – or the return of the dead as spirits – that, by transcending fixed boundaries of time and space, through ritual possession or other mechanisms, can disrupt dominant narratives of the past; as a rhetorical device for addressing colonial violence and its persistent legacies in the present, discussing notions of historical injustice and representation; and as an active process of ghosting concrete subjects, regarded as unworthy of social recognition, by disqualifying and dehumanizing them. Suggesting a move towards decolonising haunting, the project, interdisciplinary in nature, enables a critical dialogue between memory studies, cultural history and postcolonial theories, contributing to contemporary efforts of decolonising colonial-imperial pasts.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
You need to log in or register to use this function
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-GF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global FellowshipsCoordinator
3000 995 Coimbra
Portugal