Knowledge and the challenge to empires, c. 1790-1950

CABayly Poster-page-001 (1)On the 26th of July, Professor Sir Christopher Bayly, director of the South Asian Studies Centre (Cambridge University) will be at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon (ICS-UL) to present the lecture “Knowledge and the challenge to empires, c. 1790-1950”, in an activity organized by the project Colonial Mimesis in Lusophone Asia and Africa.

The lecture will take place at the Auditório Sedas Nunes, Institute of Social Sciences, between 17h-19h.

Abstract

Theorizing the Portuguese Colonial Experience

The workshop “Theorizing the Portuguese Colonial Experience. Images, History, Power” will take place on 16-17 June, at Companhia das Culturas in Castro Marim, Algarve. This closed workshop is designed as an informal brainstorming meeting in dialogue with the work of Professor Ann Laura Stoler, under the following common, general, issues: What are the mutual interferences, tensions, productivities, silences, ignorances, gaps, influences between the empirical and conceptual specificities of studying the Portuguese empire, and the wider international literature on the colonial and post-colonial? How, in short, does the study of the Portuguese colonial experience interfere with old and emerging theories of colonialism and post-colonialism? 

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Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination

On the 14th June, Professor Ann Laura Stoler (The New School for Social Research) will be at the University of Lisbon to discuss her recent edited volume Imperial Deris: On Ruins and Ruination (Duke University Press, 2013), in an activity co-organized with the project Deslocalizar a Europa (Centre for Comparative Studies, FLUL).

The conference will take place at the Faculty of Letters, Amphitheater IV, between 17h-19h.

Poster

Mimesis and the Government of Difference

3733122-0 (1)The conference “Mimesis and the Government of Difference. New Perspectives on the Portuguese Colonial Empire” will take place on 31 May-1 June, at Birbeck College, University of London. The conference is co-organized by the research projects “Colonial Mimesis in Lusophone Asia and Africa” and “The Government of Difference. Political Imagination in the Portuguese Empire (1496-1961), and will bring together historians, law historians and anthropologists to discuss new researches about the portuguese colonial empire.

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Bibliography

We have now added a new section, providing a bibliography of published works related with the concept of mimesis and its influence in history and theory. The list was compiled by the team members and we tried to provide a broad outlook, collecting works from different theoretic and historiographical traditions. Please note that this bibliography is still a work-in-progress and is in draft form. We hope to keep adding new and more diverse publications during the term of the project.

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Publications

We have updated the publications section of the website. You will now be able to find a list of the most recent publications by the team members, with the online version of some articles, chapters and working papers associated with the project. You are free to use and cite them, provided that you refer to them correctly, as explained on the front page of each paper.

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Welcome to “Colonial Mimesis in Lusophone Asia and Africa”

Colonialism is conventionally understood as a violent intrusion into the lives, cultures, and societies of the indigenous people in the extra-European world. From this perspective, a definitional feature of European colonization practically since the sixteenth century has been the effort put into drastically transforming the indigenous ways of life according to the cultural norms and social principles of the colonizers.

Cover of “La Diffeza di la Razza”, II, 19, 20 March 1939 – XVII, “Antirazzisti de tutto il mondo, unitevi!”

The current project intends to look at the role played by processes of imitation and mimesis in colonial situations from a reverse perspective, that is: as a process and as a practice of the colonizers themselves that could bear productively on colonial relations of power. The study is set in the context of Portuguese colonialism in Africa and Asia, in the nineteenth and twentieth century.

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