ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

This project proposes an analysis of the reconfigurations established in the socio-political vocabulary of the western Saharan region – southern Morocco, Western Sahara and Mauritania – from the “post-empire” to the contemporary period. The project should produce an analysis of 1) the social and political structures shared in the region, 2) the local variations of those structures, based on case studies, 3) their specific configurations, based on social markers such as gender, age, and class, 4) the use of those structures in different historical periods. All these will be under theoretical and ethnographic scrutiny in order to achieve its main goal: 5) to understand the recent articulation of the social and political structures of the Western Saharan region, with broader and often exogenous political vocabularies. The methodology used in this project is based on readings associated with different social sciences, with a particular focus on anthropology, history, and political science. The members of the research team, with experience and linguistic competence in the different geographies involved in this project, are expected to conduct original field enquiries, enabling a significant enhancement of the theoretical and ethnographic knowledge associated with this region. The project’s main goal is to analyse the types of interplay established between pre-modern socio-political traditions and contemporary political expression and activism, in a particularly sensitive – and academically disregarded – region. Its effort to integrate a context that is usually compartmentalized, as well as to put together a group of researchers generally “isolated” in their particular areas of expertise, geographies, or nations, should also be valued. The project’s results should enable the different contexts under study to be integrated into the wider maps of current scientific research, providing, at the same time a dissemination of its outputs to an extended audience.

1 192 144 €

Start date: 2017-04-01, End date: 2021-03-31

Colonial-Liberation Wars generate plural memories, conflicting evocations and persisting amnesias. The project’s main challenge is to produce innovative knowledge about the memories of the wars fought by the Portuguese state and pro-independence African movements between 1961 and 1974/5. The approach chosen is simultaneously diachronic and comparative, inasmuch as it contrasts changes that took place between the end of the conflicts and nowadays, regarding how wars, colonial pasts and anticolonial legacies have been remembered and silenced in Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Principe. The key hypothesis is that wars - as pivotal moments that ended the cycle of Empire in Portugal and started the cycle of African independences in the former Portuguese colonies - triggered memorialisation and silencing processes which had their own historicity. CROME is divided into two strands. The first one, named ‘Colonial Wars, Postcolonial States’, looks at the role played by the states under consideration in mobilising, articulating and recognising the past, but also in actively generating selective representations. ‘Memory as a battlefield’ is the second strand, which will highlight distinct uses of the past and dynamics between social memories and individual memories. The project intends to demonstrate how wars gave rise to multiple memories and conflicting historical judgements, mostly in Portugal, but also to examine how the specific nature of the (post-)colonial histories of each African country has generated different ways to summon war memories and (anti-)colonial legacies. CROME will, thus, put forward a ground-breaking perspective in terms of colonial-liberation war studies, and will be instrumental in dealing with such traumatic experience, for its comparative approach might help overcoming everlasting constraints still at play today, caused by the historical burden European colonialism left behind.

1 478 249 €

Start date: 2017-02-01, End date: 2022-01-31

Mimesis is one of the most influential concepts in Western thought. Originally invoked to define humans as the “most imitative” creatures in classical antiquity, mimesis (imitation) has recently been at the centre of theoretical debates in the humanities, social sciences, and the neurosciences concerning the role of “mimicry,” “identification,” “contagion,” and “mirror neurons” in the formation of subjectivity. And yet, despite the growing confirmations that imitation is constitutive of human behaviour, mimesis still tends to be confined to the sphere of realistic representation. The HOM project combines approaches that are usually split in different areas of disciplinary specialization to provide a correction to this tendency. Conceived as a trilogy situated at the crossroads between literary criticism, cinema studies, and critical theory, HOM’s outcomes will result in two monographs and accompanying articles that explore the aesthetic, affective, and conceptual implications of the mimetic faculty. The first, radically reframes a major proponent of anti-mimetic aesthetics in modern literature, Oscar Wilde, by looking back to the classical foundations of theatrical mimesis that inform his corpus; the second considers the material effects of virtual simulation by looking ahead to new digital media via contemporary science-fiction films; and the third establishes an interdisciplinary dialogue between philosophical accounts of mimesis and recent discoveries in the neurosciences. Together, these new perspectives on homo mimeticus reconsider the aesthetic foundations of a major literary author, open up a new line of inquiry in film studies, and steer philosophical debates on mimesis in new interdisciplinary directions.

1 044 000 €

Start date: 2016-11-01, End date: 2021-10-31

Today’s ecological crisis prompts us to rethink our attitude towards physical and natural realities that have traditionally been seen as opposed to human subjectivity and agency. What emerges from this “non-human turn” is a sense of our interdependence on things like the bacteria in our intestines or the carbon atoms supporting life on Earth. Ecological theorist Timothy Morton uses the metaphor of the “mesh” to express this idea of human/non-human interconnectedness. This project will map the formal and thematic strategies through which contemporary narrative practices engage with the non-human and envisage this interconnectedness. Storytelling is an indispensable tool for making sense of experience by establishing temporal and causal relations. But it is also biased towards the human-scale realities of action and social interaction. How can narrative overcome this bias? How does it convey phenomena that challenge our belief in the ontological and material self-sufficiency of the human? Comparing fictional narratives in print (novels and short stories) and conversational storytelling, we will systematically explore the ways in which narrative can forge connections across levels of reality, weaving together the human and the non-human into a single plot. The assumption is that narrative is a field where fictional practices are in constant dialogue with the stories told in everyday conversation—and with the culture-wide beliefs and concerns those stories reflect. Through its three sub-projects, the proposed research charts this complex dialogue while greatly advancing our understanding of how stories can be used to heighten people’s awareness of the mesh and its significance. The project builds on a combination of methods (close readings of novels, qualitative analysis of interviews), aiming to open up a new field of study at the intersection of literary scholarship and the social sciences—with narrative theory serving as a catalyst for the interdisciplinary exchange.

1 130 000 €

Start date: 2017-02-01, End date: 2022-01-31