Block Seminar

3-4 April 2019
2 pm – 5 pm, room 5.2.

Catarina Martins – University of Coimbra /CES

Ecologies of the bodies. Post-abyssal reflections on feminisms from African women’s literature

This seminar aims at expanding the theoretical concepts of “abyssal line” and “ecologies of knowledges” (Sousa Santos) in the sense of a critical analysis both of feminisms and of post-colonial literary studies. Indeed, colonialism and patriarchy rely not only on a particular racialised and gendered coding of the bodies, but mainly on the production of the notion of body itself, as separated from the mind. To achieve social justice by producing cognitive justice, we must be alert to cultural and social organizations in which the body is possibly understood, felt, and codified otherwise. This requires critical-self questioning even by emancipatory epistemological paradigms such as feminist and gender theory. The starting point for this reflection will be a set of poetic and narrative texts written by women from different regions of the African continent.