Papers by Gonçalo Cholant
Human Rights in the Americas, 2021
The aim of this work is exploring questions of identity construction and the body in a context of... more The aim of this work is exploring questions of identity construction and the body in a context of insecurity, violence, and trauma, as presented by Ta-Nehisi Coates. In Between the World and Me (2015), winner of the National Book Award (non-fiction), Coates delivers an exploration of his personal history in an eloquent letter to his son, approaching the matter of the insecurity of the black body in the United States. The author states: “America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men”, questioning the moral superiority of the American ideals and its exceptionalism, creating a deep analysis of blackness and americanness, connecting the feelings of growing up in the 1960s and 1970s with the experience of black life in our days. Coates is in deep conversation with James Baldwin, weaving an argument that demonstrates the ever-present linear path of violence inflicted upon the black body in the United States, from slavery to Reconstruction, the Civil Rights era and finally to the present state of police brutality and mass incarceration
Tese de Doutoramento em Linguas Modernas: Culturas, Literaturas, Traducao, no ramo de Culturas e ... more Tese de Doutoramento em Linguas Modernas: Culturas, Literaturas, Traducao, no ramo de Culturas e Literaturas, apresentada ao Departamento de Linguas, Literaturas e Culturas da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra
Perspectives on Black Lives Matter: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Wesley Lowery The relevance of the Black... more Perspectives on Black Lives Matter: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Wesley Lowery The relevance of the Black Lives Matter movement is central to the understanding of the political climate found in present day United States. After the Obama era, a period that reshaped the ways the country was able to make sense of its national identity, and the subsequent election of Donald Trump, the preeminence of racist (state) violence demonstrates that the racial chasm is an open wound that seems to have been freshly inflicted once again in the American collective psyche. The works of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Wesley Lowery are two examples of how the Black Lives Matter Movement is present in the conversations regarding racial equality, police violence and white supremacy that are at the core of America today. Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power - an American Tragedy and Between the World and Me, in addition to Lowery’s They Can´t Kill Us All, are the main titles that are going to be used to try and better understand how this decentralized movement is the new face of protest in the United States and possibly abroad. While Coates deals with the implications of the fragility of the black body and how it is implicated in structural forms of violence, Lowery investigates how the movement took shape and evolved over time, exposing the intricacies of injustice and oppression experienced by African Americans who envisioned a new form of civil resistance. Keywords: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Wesley Lowery, Resistance, Police Violence, Racism.
A partir de uma perspectiva de Estudos Inter-Americanos, os estudos de caso que compõem esta cole... more A partir de uma perspectiva de Estudos Inter-Americanos, os estudos de caso que compõem esta coleção debruçam-se sobre a definição do social, suas configurações tradicionais e reconfigurações mais recentes no contexto alargado das Américas, e sobre as crises e lutas sociais do passado e do presente, juntamente com as diferentes respostas, movimentos, narrativas e discursos de resistência que têm gerado. Através da exploração de novos territórios, este volume pretende contribuir para a criação de uma nova gramática e pedagogia do social, a partir de perspectivas epistemológicas e práticas sobre as Américas. É ainda de relevar o caráter interdisciplinar desta publicação, na qual se cruzam a história, a sociologia, a crítica literária, cinematográfica e musical.
Op. Cit. REVISTA DE ESTUDOS ANGLO-AMERICANOS, 2018
Edwidge Danticat’s Untwine (2015) and Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (2017) are both works market... more Edwidge Danticat’s Untwine (2015) and Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give (2017) are both works marketed as young adult fiction, dealing with representations of contemporary United States having race as their main axis of narrative focus. Both works try to explore the intricacies of race in the development of young female protagonists, who must deal with identity questions that are complicated by this marker in their coming of age. The present work tries to better understand how the authors approach these questions in their texts, which differ it the treatment of matters related to racism, trauma and violence. While Danticat creates a “home” for the characters in which blackness is celebrated and memorialized, albeit the characters do not have to deal with the experience of racism; Thomas deeply explores questions of a violent reality and the fragility if the black body in contemporary USA, engaging with the Black Lives Matter Movement, police brutality, and structural forms of oppression and violence.
OFICINA DO CES, 2018
The aim of this work is exploring questions of identity construction and the body in a context of... more The aim of this work is exploring questions of identity construction and the body in a context of insecurity, violence, and trauma, as presented by Ta-Nehisi Coates. In Between the World and Me (2015), winner of the National Book Award (non-fiction), Coates delivers an exploration of his personal history in an eloquent letter to his son, approaching the matter of the insecurity of the black body in the United States. The author states: “America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men”, questioning the moral superiority of the American ideals and its exceptionalism, creating a deep analysis of blackness and americanness, connecting the feelings of growing up in the 1960s and 1970s with the experience of black life in our days. Coates is in deep conversation with James Baldwin, weaving an argument that demonstrates the ever-present linear path of violence inflicted upon the black body in the United States, from slavery to Reconstruction, the Civil Rights era and finally to the present state of police brutality and mass incarceration.
Keywords: violence, African-American literature, trauma, racism.
Anglo Saxonica Journal Serie III Nº 14, 2017
In this essay we propose a reflection on the meaning of “homeland” and “home” for individuals and... more In this essay we propose a reflection on the meaning of “homeland” and “home” for individuals and groups, citizens of a second order, who are profiled as “alien”, “undesirable” and “disposable” in the U. S. We argue that the post 9/11 rhetoric and policy of surveillance and security is not new to American history; they just expose and magnify the longstanding roots in colonialism and capitalist exploitation of an Anglo-Saxonist sense of racial superiority and white privilege. Blacks, browns, as well as undesirable immigrants have been marked by color or “illegality” and pressed into poverty and destitution. In the current political circumstances, not exclusively in the U. S., they are the most vulnerable victims of a system of economic liberalism which resorts to racial profiling, police militarization, and massive incarceration. One of the most evident consequences is the fact that prisons, mostly private ones, are predominantly filled by individuals belonging to these groups. We conclude that public resistance, social networks, and intersectional/transnational solidarity may oppose these threats to the best principles of democracy.
KEYWORDS
Home; Homeland security; Racial profiling; Immigration; Mass incarceration.
The present work aims at analyzing Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008)
through the perspectives of An... more The present work aims at analyzing Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008)
through the perspectives of Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein and the concept of Americanity. In this post-modern historical fiction Morrison revisits America during its inception, rewriting the traditional historiography and symbolically returning agency and voice to colonized subjects, namely women: black, indigenous, and white. Coloniality, ethnicity, racism, and the conception of the “new” are characteristic of the formation of the New World and are present in this work through the characters who represent social minorities and also through the dynamics of interactions among
themselves and the colonizers. America is seen as a ‘third space’, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, in which the historical discourse is rethought and reorganized. The “new” proposed by Quijano and Wallerstein is in line with Bhabha’s propositions, since the original character of Americanity depended mostly on the interactions and negotiation
of cultures in this third space. Morrison dismantles the hegemonic discourse using fiction, creating a third space in which these subjects are empowered and are capable of resisting.
Resumo: Este artigo lida com interpretações de uma série de obras de Frida Kahlo e sua relação co... more Resumo: Este artigo lida com interpretações de uma série de obras de Frida Kahlo e sua relação com os Estados Unidos, já que Kahlo viveu em Nova Iorque por um curto período de sua vida. O enquadramento teórico escolhido para esta análise combina as ideias de Glória Anzaldúa, José Martí, HomiBhabha, José Luiz Gomez-MartinezeRubénDarío, nomeadamente através da utilização de conceitos tais como fronteira, hibridismo e mestiçagem. As obras de Kahlo selecionadas para este trabalho lidam com diferentes representações e entendimentos do tema fronteira: desde a fronteira geográfica entre o México e os Estados Unidos, até as fronteiras étnicas e subjetivas. Kahlo é representativa dos conflitos entre diferentes tradições culturais que se entrecruzam para criar um espaço novo, um espaço que dialogicamente recria e reinterpreta esta realidade híbrida para poder fazer sentido da mesma. Este " terceiro espaço " (Bhabha) é relevante pois ele aborda a cultura e a política, enquanto reorganiza signos e símbolos para expressar a construção da subjetividade em contextos que partilham inúmeras tradições emprestadas por diferentes histórias, tanto coloniais quanto indígenas, além do poder exercido pelos Estados Unidos sobre o continente americano. Palavras-chave: Frida Kahlo, fronteira, hibridismo. Abstract: This paper deals with interpretations of a series of Frida Kahlo's paintings in their relation to the United States, since Kahlo lived in New York for a short period of her life. The theoretical framework chosen for this analysis combines the ideas of Gloria Anzaldúa, José Martí, HomiBhabha, José Luiz Gomez-Martinez, and Rubén Darío, namely through the use of concepts such as borders, hybridity and mestizaje. Kahlo's selected paintings deal with different representations and understandings of the topic of the border: from the geographical border between Mexico and the US to ethnic and subjective borders. Kahlo is representative of the conflicts between different cultural traditions that intermingle to create a new space, one that dialogically recreates and reinterprets this hybrid reality in order to make sense of it. This " third space " (Bhabha) is relevant because it speaks of culture and politics, as it reorganizes signs and symbols in order to express the construction of subjectivity in contexts that share innumerable traditions borrowed from different histories, both colonial and indigenous, and in which the imperial power exerted by the US over the American continent and the world plays no minor role either. Introdução
This paper deals with an analysis of the representations of trauma and violence in two works of c... more This paper deals with an analysis of the representations of trauma and violence in two works of contemporary African-American literature: Toni Morrison’s fiction The Bluest Eye, and Maya Angelou’s autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. Both works deal with coming of age stories of black girls in the segregated United States, covering topics such as rape, racism, sexism and poverty. Violence takes many shapes in these stories, such as the beauty patterns defined by a white-supremacist culture, the way a segregated society operated institutionally backing up racism, and finally sexual violence on an infant body. This work tries to better understand the ways in which structural violence (Galtung) contributes to the perpetuation of violence and trauma in the experiences of black women in the United States. As well as trying to understand the role of trauma representations as a means for the overcoming of the traumatic event.
Book Reviews by Gonçalo Cholant
Recensão de A nossa casa é onde está o coração, de Toni Morrison (Original: Home). Tradução de Ma... more Recensão de A nossa casa é onde está o coração, de Toni Morrison (Original: Home). Tradução de Manuela Madureira. Lisboa: Editorial Presença, 2015, 144 pp.
ISBN: 978-972-23-5496-7
Book Chapters by Gonçalo Cholant
Everything is a Story: Creative Interactions in Anglo-American Studies, 2019
Perspectives on Black Lives Matter: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Wesley Lowery
The relevance of the Bla... more Perspectives on Black Lives Matter: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Wesley Lowery
The relevance of the Black Lives Matter movement is central to the understanding of the political climate found in present day United States. After the Obama era, a period that reshaped the ways the country was able to make sense of its national identity, and the subsequent election of Donald Trump, the preeminence of racist (state) violence demonstrates that the racial chasm is an open wound that seems to have been freshly inflicted once again in the American collective psyche. The works of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Wesley Lowery are two examples of how the Black Lives Matter Movement is present in the conversations regarding racial equality, police violence and white supremacy that are at the core of America today. Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power - an American Tragedy and Between the World and Me, in addition to Lowery’s They Can´t Kill Us All, are the main titles that are going to be used to try and better understand how this decentralized movement is the new face of protest in the United States and possibly abroad. While Coates deals with the implications of the fragility of the black body and how it is implicated in structural forms of violence, Lowery investigates how the movement took shape and evolved over time, exposing the intricacies of injustice and oppression experienced by African Americans who envisioned a new form of civil resistance.
Keywords: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Wesley Lowery, Resistance, Police Violence, Racism.
Florbela Espanca foi e ainda é uma das mais interessantes poetisas da literatura portuguesa. Sua... more Florbela Espanca foi e ainda é uma das mais interessantes poetisas da literatura portuguesa. Sua contribuição mais relevante foram seus sonetos, onde cantava o amor, a dor e a condição feminina com grande destreza. Florbela também se aventurou em contos e um diário. A escrita deste revela-nos mais um viés por onde podemos tentar chegar mais perto daquela mulher que virou musa, partindo da posição de escritora para a de personagem de sua própria existência. Este artigo visa trabalhar com a questão da escrita de mulheres no diário do último ano de Florbela Espanca. Proponho uma elaboração sobre a escrita feminina no diário, tendo como ponto de partida a teoria de Lúcia Castello-Branco, que introduz o conceito da “feminina desmemória”. Faz-se necessária então uma abordagem que compreende a teoria da escrita de diários, uma prática que por ser considerada como um tipo de literatura menor, maciçamente feminina, por muitos anos passou despercebida, para não chamá-la de excluída, do campo da investigação. Toda escrita é permeada por intenções, nuances que ficam por debaixo e por entre as linhas que compõe o tecido textual, os escritos relacionados à memória não são diferentes. A análise deste tipo de texto se faz importante devido à riqueza de informações que podem ser encontradas, revelando detalhes que transitam entre o privado e o público, a ficção e a realidade.
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Papers by Gonçalo Cholant
Keywords: violence, African-American literature, trauma, racism.
KEYWORDS
Home; Homeland security; Racial profiling; Immigration; Mass incarceration.
through the perspectives of Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein and the concept of Americanity. In this post-modern historical fiction Morrison revisits America during its inception, rewriting the traditional historiography and symbolically returning agency and voice to colonized subjects, namely women: black, indigenous, and white. Coloniality, ethnicity, racism, and the conception of the “new” are characteristic of the formation of the New World and are present in this work through the characters who represent social minorities and also through the dynamics of interactions among
themselves and the colonizers. America is seen as a ‘third space’, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, in which the historical discourse is rethought and reorganized. The “new” proposed by Quijano and Wallerstein is in line with Bhabha’s propositions, since the original character of Americanity depended mostly on the interactions and negotiation
of cultures in this third space. Morrison dismantles the hegemonic discourse using fiction, creating a third space in which these subjects are empowered and are capable of resisting.
Book Reviews by Gonçalo Cholant
ISBN: 978-972-23-5496-7
Book Chapters by Gonçalo Cholant
The relevance of the Black Lives Matter movement is central to the understanding of the political climate found in present day United States. After the Obama era, a period that reshaped the ways the country was able to make sense of its national identity, and the subsequent election of Donald Trump, the preeminence of racist (state) violence demonstrates that the racial chasm is an open wound that seems to have been freshly inflicted once again in the American collective psyche. The works of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Wesley Lowery are two examples of how the Black Lives Matter Movement is present in the conversations regarding racial equality, police violence and white supremacy that are at the core of America today. Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power - an American Tragedy and Between the World and Me, in addition to Lowery’s They Can´t Kill Us All, are the main titles that are going to be used to try and better understand how this decentralized movement is the new face of protest in the United States and possibly abroad. While Coates deals with the implications of the fragility of the black body and how it is implicated in structural forms of violence, Lowery investigates how the movement took shape and evolved over time, exposing the intricacies of injustice and oppression experienced by African Americans who envisioned a new form of civil resistance.
Keywords: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Wesley Lowery, Resistance, Police Violence, Racism.
Keywords: violence, African-American literature, trauma, racism.
KEYWORDS
Home; Homeland security; Racial profiling; Immigration; Mass incarceration.
through the perspectives of Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein and the concept of Americanity. In this post-modern historical fiction Morrison revisits America during its inception, rewriting the traditional historiography and symbolically returning agency and voice to colonized subjects, namely women: black, indigenous, and white. Coloniality, ethnicity, racism, and the conception of the “new” are characteristic of the formation of the New World and are present in this work through the characters who represent social minorities and also through the dynamics of interactions among
themselves and the colonizers. America is seen as a ‘third space’, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, in which the historical discourse is rethought and reorganized. The “new” proposed by Quijano and Wallerstein is in line with Bhabha’s propositions, since the original character of Americanity depended mostly on the interactions and negotiation
of cultures in this third space. Morrison dismantles the hegemonic discourse using fiction, creating a third space in which these subjects are empowered and are capable of resisting.
ISBN: 978-972-23-5496-7
The relevance of the Black Lives Matter movement is central to the understanding of the political climate found in present day United States. After the Obama era, a period that reshaped the ways the country was able to make sense of its national identity, and the subsequent election of Donald Trump, the preeminence of racist (state) violence demonstrates that the racial chasm is an open wound that seems to have been freshly inflicted once again in the American collective psyche. The works of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Wesley Lowery are two examples of how the Black Lives Matter Movement is present in the conversations regarding racial equality, police violence and white supremacy that are at the core of America today. Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power - an American Tragedy and Between the World and Me, in addition to Lowery’s They Can´t Kill Us All, are the main titles that are going to be used to try and better understand how this decentralized movement is the new face of protest in the United States and possibly abroad. While Coates deals with the implications of the fragility of the black body and how it is implicated in structural forms of violence, Lowery investigates how the movement took shape and evolved over time, exposing the intricacies of injustice and oppression experienced by African Americans who envisioned a new form of civil resistance.
Keywords: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Wesley Lowery, Resistance, Police Violence, Racism.