Memory, difference and relationships

• Grant number: 22/07816-5
• Support Opportunities: Research Projects - Thematic Grants
• Start date: August 01, 2025
• End date: July 31, 2030
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Melvina Afra Mendes de Araújo
• Grantee: Melvina Afra Mendes de Araújo
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil
• Pesquisadores principais: Omar Ribeiro Thomaz
• Associated researchers: Andréa Carolina Schvartz Peres ; Clayton da Silva Guerreiro ; Francesca Declich ; Gábor Basch ; Laurick Zerbini ; Marie-Aude Fouere ; Paolo Israel ; Paulo de Tarso Medeiros Valerio ; Paulo Ricardo Muller ; Pingréwaoga Béma Abdoul Hadi Savadogo ; Rodrigo Domenech de Souza ; Rosa Cavalcanti Ribas Vieira ; Vanessa Elisa Margherita Maria Durando

Abstract

Memories concerning the experiences of national liberation struggles, civil wars, state-building, and national, ethnic, regional, and religious identities have currently been given a central place in academic debates. This is due not only to the potential conflictive feature that these categories have raised in contemporaneity, but also to the changes that influence countries formed after a long experience of colonial imposition associated with the differences and inequalities experienced in the post-independence period. In the African continent, where most of the research proposed in the project is developed, and in other countries which adopted socialist oriented governance systems after the proclamation of national independences, the historicization of the State has helped to explain the origins of inequalities based on different levels of access to resources and also processes that culminated in the construction of differences that are mostly hierarchical - ethnic, religious, regional, racial, and gender, among others - often resulting in conflicts of various kinds and, in some cases, in the extermination of populations. This project proposes studies in an essentially multidisciplinary field about memory, wars, and colonialism, based on approaches about the relational construction of subjectivities, differences, and inequalities. Combining research in archival documents, images and digital sources in museums based both in the countries of the former colonial metropoles, as well as in the countries where fieldwork will be held, the proposals in this project have as a common issue how memories, inequalities and differentiations emerge from relational processes. (AU)