New Poetics of Resistance: the Twenty-First Century in Portugal
The project New Poetics of Resistance: the Twenty-First Century in Portugal is an interdisciplinary project which includes four knowledge areas: Literary Studies, Translation Studies, Sociology and Linguistics. It considers the politics of language, namely some languages which from their margins produce the centre, all the while resisting it, serving ‘that which is not’ (Dante), reinventing and enquiring into the space of excess (Lecercle), still the home of language which is disapproved of, reproved or as-yet-to-be proved (Howe). In this space, the infinite possibilities are founded for the ever ‘new poetics of resistance’: in experimentation; in the effort, at once inevitable and impossible, of translating; in recognising the incompleteness of a dia(multi)topic hermeneutics demanded by multiculturalism, by emigration, by bilingualism; in etymological enquiry – set upon a sociology of absences (Sousa Santos), in the permanent and inevitable search for a line of escape (Deleuze and Guattari) which, since it is always in a dynamic process, can only lead to nomadism, to de-centring and to de-territorialising language and the identity constructed in it.
This project showed how it is much easier to move from the local to the transnational in the field of Portuguese literature than from the local to the national which, in itself, proves the existence of a systemic centralism:
literary projects outside Lisbon or Porto, oral literature and women’s writing remain largely invisible. Reading and writing practices – involving Eastern European immigrant children and those undergoing social reinsertion or teenagers being treated for drug addiction – are based on strictly normative language use processes, thus leading to discrimination and negative identity construction which could be avoided by the use of more democratic poetic and/or artistic practices. Translation underlined the importance of experimentalism and how the contact with linguistic difference and diversity opens up new meanings and spaces for active citizenship. One of the results was the video documentary O Não-Dito, o Interdito e o Inaudito. Escrita Criativa e Poéticas de Resistência em Portugal (1990-2010).
Aline Lourenço
Clara Keating
Clara Moura
Cristina Néry
Feliciano Mira
Graça Capinha (coord)
Isabel Pedro dos Santos
Jorge Fragoso Ribeiro
Jorge Vaz Nande
José Manuel Lourenço
Olga Solovova
Rita Grácio