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The Afterlives of Contract and Enslavement: Narratives on Indentured Labour between Cape Verde and S. Tomé and Príncipe

Description du projet

Les fantômes dans les récits de travail en servitude dans les archipels africains

Financé par le programme Actions Marie Skłodowska-Curie, le projet GHOST s’appuie sur des recherches approfondies sur les récits d’esclaves – notamment la poésie, la prose, la peinture, le cinéma, les chansons, la presse et les récits de vie – pour explorer l’histoire culturelle du travail forcé colonial (et ses séquelles) au Cap-Vert et à São Tomé-et-Príncipe. Le projet examine comment et pourquoi les récits de travail en servitude, communément appelé contrato (terme caché pour le travail forcé), ont évolué au fil du temps dans ces deux archipels africains à partir du 20e siècle. GHOST utilise le concept de hantise pour étudier les expériences coloniales de travail en servitude, en analysant les fantômes et les hantises comme des entités spirituelles, des outils rhétoriques et des moyens de marginalisation.

Objectif

This project provides the first comprehensive study on the entangled cultural memories of plantation' indentured labour under Portuguese colonialism in Cape Verde and S. Tom and Prncipe, 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.

Champ scientifique (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classe les projets avec EuroSciVoc, une taxonomie multilingue des domaines scientifiques, grâce à un processus semi-automatique basé sur des techniques TLN. La classification de ce projet a été validée par l’équipe qui en a la charge.

Coordinateur

CENTRO DE ESTUDOS SOCIAIS
Contribution nette de l'UE
€ 217 245,60

Partenaires (2)