Dr. Noemi Alfieri
Dr. Noemi Alfieri
Short Bio
Noemi Alfieri was a Post-Doc Fellow of the FCT project “AFROLAB: Building African Literatures. Institutions and Consecration inside and outside the Portuguese-Language Space (1960-2020)”, based at CLEPUL (U.Lisbon, 2022). PhD in Portuguese Studies, with specialization in Book History and Textual Criticism (2021, NOVA-FCSH). Her dissertation “(Re)construir a Identidade através do Conflito: Uma Abordagem às Literaturas Africanas em Língua Portuguesa (1961-74)” was entitled an Honorable Mention in the Mário Soares-EDP Foundation Prize (2021). Collaborator Researcher at CHAM (NOVA-FCSH); Associate Member of CREPAL (Sorbonne Nouvelle); Member of the group Áfricas (UERJ-UFRJ) In November 2019, she researched at CEM Eduardo Augusto Kwamba (ISCED-Luanda). Team Member of the FCT Projects AFROLAB and WOMENLIT - Women’s Literature: Memories, Peripheries and Resistance in the Luso-Afro-Brazilian Atlantic (NOVA-FCSH). Member of the COST Action 18126 - “Writing Urban Places – New Narratives from the European City” (EU). She is interested in the circulation of printed materials, ideas and their agents, as well as in their reception, currently focusing on African editorial projects form the 1950’s to the 1970’s, with emphasis on Angolan Literature. She is concerned with the mobility of objects, people and ideas through the transnational networks established within Africa, Europe, and Latin America by negritudinists, Pan-African or anti-colonial writers and intellectuals in those decades, with a special attention on the underrepresentation of female agency in the historical and academic narrations produced about and in those cultural environments. She endorses a decolonial, feminist and intersectional approach to academic research, writing and the arts, joining collective anticolonial and antiracist literary and artistic projects.
Selected Publications
- 2021: “Negritude e Pan-Africanismo da Présence Africaine à Mensagem. Um roteiro da circulação de ideias e impressos (depois de 1945)”, Revista Mulemba – v. 13 nº 5 (Jul – Dec 2021), UFRJ, (Brazil), 92-105. https://revistas.ufrj.br/index.php/mulemba/article/view/51451/28613
- 2021: “Women’s issues: African writers fighting Portuguese colonialism in the 1950’s”, Tolomeo - Rivista di Studi Postcoloniali, 281 – 300, Cá Foscari University of Venice (Italy) http://doi.org/10.30687/Tol/2499-5975/2021/23/031
- 2021: “Múltiplas subalternidades, múltiplas resistências. Reflexões sobre mulheres, escrita e colonialismo a partir da escrita de Alda Espírito Santo”, in Literatura, feminismos e história: imbricações possíveis, Via Atlântica no 39 (2021), 268 – 297, USP (Brazil) https://doi.org/10.11606/va.i39.181176
- 2020: “Laboratórios identitários em revista: o «Artes e Letras» do ABC, Diário de Angola. Entre debates literários e dinâmicas de relacionamento intercultural (1961-1974)”, PSR - Portuguese Studies Review, 28 (1) (2020): 131-146, York University (Canada) http://www.maproom44.com/psr/previews/PSR_28_1_ISSN_1057_1515_OPAC_D.pdf
- 2020: “Noémia de Sousa, ou ser “África da cabeça aos pés” em tempos de colonização” JLS - Journal of Lusophone Studies 4(2) (2020): 219 – 233, APSA (USA) https://doi.org/10.21471/jls.v4i2.344
Project Description
The project “Mapping anti-colonial networks through literature. Transnational connections of African thinkers in the reconfiguration of space and thought (1950s - 70s)” reflects on intellectual displacement, on the mobility of objects and ideas through the networks established within Africa and Europe by negritudinists, Pan-African or anti-colonial writers and intellectuals. It aims at mapping connections, circulations and translations of printed material, namely literary works, through space in those decades, with a special attention to the underrepresentation of female agency in the historical and academic narrations produced about and in those cultural environments. The enquiry on the connections between publications such as the bulletin Mensagem (Lisbon), Cultura II (Luanda) and the reviews Présence Africaine (Paris and Dakar) and Black Orpheus (Ibadan) has the intention of reflecting on the racial exclusions and inequalities intensified by the capitalist oppression and its colonial foundation, with particular attention to the socio-political context. By endorsing a decolonial approach, cities are conceived as intellectual hubs that, being a destination of exile, contributed to the conceptual dislocation and reconfiguration of the idea of centre. Conditionings to the movement and reception of printed matters and the ideas they vehiculated, such as the institutional censorship or political persecution and incarceration, will be also considered, as well as the cultural influence African intellectuals had on European political and intellectual cultures. The cultural and literary production of that period is, therefore, understood as a tool of communication, mobility, and transposition from the individual to the collective, in search of mutual, collaborative, and common paths.