[Commlist] Comunicação e Sociedade | Call for papers | Historical reparations: Destabilising constructions from the colonial past

*Comunicação e Sociedade | Call for papers | Historical reparations: 
Destabilising constructions from the colonial past*

**

*Editors*:  Vítor de Sousa (CECS, University of Minho, Portugal), Sheila 
Khan (CECS, University of Minho, Portugal) and Pedro Schacht Pereira 
(Ohio State University, USA)

The contestation of ethnocentrism by post-colonial critique, among other 
consequences, has questioned various panegyrics of memory in public 
space. Concepts whose mission was to confer stability on the social 
world are therefore being questioned today and are becoming increasingly 
obsolete. In this specific case, there is the idea of the museum and 
other manifestations in the public space, such as statuary. In addition, 
issues considered to be fractious, such as systemic racism, the survival 
of old colonial logics of racialisation and racial surveillance, and the 
struggles for gender equality, are adding up against the /status quo/.

The study of the past serves as an ethical, moral and civic stance to 
reflect on the permanence of old logics of coloniality that permeate 
current social, political, historical and cultural contexts. From the 
experience of globalisation, we realise that the contemporary world is 
interdependent and that globalisation, even with all the criticisms 
associated with it, allows other modes of relationship, sustained, for 
example, in an alterglobalist logic (Hardt & Negri, 2019). In this 
sense, it is relevant to highlight the argument that the world is 
neither static nor historically homogeneous. The mindset of Western 
modernity underpinned its ideology, through hegemony, violence, 
racialisation and racial surveillance, on this premise: to flatten the 
world of human diversity according to criteria that excluded all those 
who did not fit into the grand narrative and grammar of Western 
progress, civilisation and development. This historical and ontological 
erasure has condemned thousands and thousands of human beings to 
backwardness. No latitude in the world has escaped this praxis, with 
Western modernity being tentacular and agile in its mechanisms and 
devices of domination, appropriation and regulation.

The confrontation with the colonial system until post-colonialism was a 
painful, bruising and tortuous path, requiring an exercise of collective 
memory duty. Today, to understand the legacies of this modern 
coloniality, it is relevant to place at the heart of academic and civil 
debate the multiple voices and narratives. Those will contribute to a 
more profound and comprehensive mapping of the mechanisms of the 
colonial past still active in our contemporaneity. The memories, 
narratives, manifestos, social activism and the debates around 
recognition and historical reparation, mirrored in public and media 
communication processes, have become, from a cultural and political 
point of view, fertile ground and a commitment to historical 
introspection. Challenging battles are fought for the construction of a 
more just, equitable and repairing narrative.

This volume of /Comunicação e Sociedade/ focuses on the rich 
interdisciplinary commitment to an attentive and intelligent dialogue 
between the legacies of coloniality and the current processes of 
historical reparation in various dimensions of human historicity. With 
this approach, we intend to invite scholars from various parts of the 
world to take up this urgent and necessary challenge for the memory of 
future generations and the problematisation of communication phenomena.

Paper proposals should address one or more of the following topics:

– Legacies of coloniality. New mappings on racialisation processes and 
racial surveillance;

– From coloniality as opposition to interculturality;

– Luso-tropicalism and its current repercussions on Portuguese society;

– Decolonisation of museums, statues and other public monuments;

– Fetishism and abolitionism;

– Art, memory and post-colonial literature;

– The role of post-memory as a duty of memory;

– Historical reparation. Memory, slavery and race;

– Historical reparation. Humanistic genetics and race;

– Black Lives Matter as a reparations movement;

– Curatorial artivism: how can organised groups or individuals offer 
narratives towards reinterpreting colonial public statuary and other 
equipment?

– Digital networks and intercultural dynamics;

– Digitisation of cultures and arts;

– Political confrontations in the media space: Nationalism and populism 
vs historical reparation;

– New tools of coloniality: Big Data and Algorithms;

– Media discourses, memory and transformation.

**

*KEY DATES*

Deadline for submission: November 18 2021

Notification of acceptance: January 21 2022

Deadline for the complete and translated: March 18 2022

Publication: June 2022

*LANGUAGE*

Papers can be submitted in English or Portuguese. At the peer-review 
process, the authors of selected articles should ensure the translation 
of their article. The editors shall have the final decision on the 
publication of the article.

*EDITING AND SUBMISSION*

/Comunicação e Sociedade/ is an open-access academic journal, operating 
according to demanding standards of the peer-review system, and operates 
on a double-blind peer-review process. After submission, each paper will 
be distributed to two reviewers. previously invited to evaluate it 
according to its academic quality, originality and relevance to the 
objectives and scope of the theme of this issue of the journal.

Originals should be submitted through the journal’s website 
(https://revistacomsoc.pt/). When accessing /Comunicação e 
Sociedade/ for the first time, you must register before submitting your 
article (instructions to register here - 
https://revistacomsoc.pt/user/register).

Refer to the guidelines for authors here 
(https://revistacomsoc.pt/about/submissions)

For further information, please contact: (comunicacaoesociedade /at/ ics.uminho.pt)

*References*

Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2019). Empire, twenty years on. New Left Review, 
120, 67-92.

No payment from the authors will be required.

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