SCHEDULE
Brazilian Film Culture and Inclusive Citation: The Case of Afro-Brazilian Horror
Professor Stephanie Dennison (Leeds University)
As we draw to the end of the International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024), I want to explore in my talk the development, growing recognition of, and the continued challenges facing Afro-Brazilian film culture in the world’s largest Afro Diaspora population. Taking my cues from the work of Girish Shambu (2019) and the #citeblackwomen initiative, I argue that citing inclusively both in terms of theorists, filmmakers, and a wider range of films (short films, video art and music videos, as well as popular genres, for example), in a conscious act of decentring the (white and often male) auteur, can enrich our understanding of contemporary Brazilian culture more broadly. My case studies will be drawn primarily from the burgeoning Afro-Brazilian horror film production.
Stephanie Dennison holds a Chair in Brazilian Studies at the University of Leeds, where she directs the Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures. She is currently interim Head of the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies. She served as sub-panel member for Modern Languages and Linguistics in REF2021 and was President of ABIL 2018-2021. As well as numerous articles and edited collections on Brazilian, Latin American and World Cinema, she is the author of three monographs on Brazilian film, the most recent, Remapping Brazilian Film Culture in the 21st Century, was published by Routledge in 2020. She is currently completing a co-edited book with Laura Cánepa entitled Contemporary Brazilian Horror Film: Neo-fascism, Disaffection, Resistance (forthcoming with Tamesis Press).
KEynote speakers
A Taxonomy of Discomfort:
Life at the Intersection of the Subject-Object Epistemic Position
Dr. Emanuelle Santos (Birmingham University)
The biannual conference of the Association of British and Irish Lusitanists offers us a periodic opportunity to come together and appreciate the robustness and vigour of the scholarship about the cultures and societies of the Portuguese-speaking world produced and circulated in the UK and Ireland. It is a privileged space where we can gather and reassess the challenges and opportunities of the wider discipline of Modern Languages, currently reinventing itself as Languages, Cultures and Societies, as well as a chance to ponder over the impact of concrete obstacles for all those in the field, across all career levels. In this keynote address, I take the occasion to invite this community to reflect on more fundamental aspects such as ethics and agency in our positionality as scholars at the core of the Global North involved in knowledge-making about peripheral societies largely situated in the Global South. Departing from an autoethnographic account of life at the intersection of the subject-object epistemic position in Portuguese studies, I hope to contribute to fruitful discussions on the wider topic of research ethics within systemic inequality that is relevant for Modern Languages as a whole.
Emanuelle Santos is an Associate Professor in Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham, where she coordinates the Portuguese Studies programme and is the Director of the Instituto Camões’ Cátedra Gil Vicente. Her work focuses on the intersections between the cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world, postcolonial studies and world literature, drawing attention to the global-local dialectics in epistemology, literary and critical theory.