Program

Programme Overview coming soon!

SPECIAL EVENTS

Key Note by Laura de Mello e Souza (Departamento de História, USP):

“Provisional Forms of Existence in Portuguese America – 16th-18th Centuries“

Abstract

The occupation of a territory that today spans 8,500,000 km² was a slow and arduous process, made possible in large part by the knowledge of Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans, both of whom were accustomed to life in predominantly tropical and subtropical regions.

An examination of daily life in the interior of this territory between the 16th and 18th centuries reveals how what I define as ‘provisional forms of existence’ were improvised and developed, blending knowledge from diverse cultural traditions: those of the Indigenous populations, Africans and their Afro-descendant heirs—whether enslaved or freedmen—and Portuguese colonisers. This study thus explores the forms and meanings of their everyday acts of incorporation and re-creation, which conferred specificity upon the society that emerged from the violent and dramatic encounter of these distinct cultures and ultimately contributed to shaping present-day Brazil.

Biography

Laura de Mello e Souza was born in São Paulo, where she spent most of her life. She earned her degree in History from the University of São Paulo (USP) in 1975. She completed her Master’s (1977–1980) and PhD (1982–1986) at the same university, under the supervision of Fernando A. Novais. She joined the Department of History at USP as a professor of Modern History in 1983 and retired in 2014, when she assumed the Chair of Brazilian History at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, concluding her teaching career in 2022. She currently continues to supervise some doctoral students in France (Sorbonne and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales/EHESS) and in Brazil (USP) and remains active in research and writing after 42 years of university teaching. She has three daughters and three granddaughters.

Key Note by Fe Navarrete (Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas):

“Cosmohistories, the multiplicity of worlds and their histories“

Abstract

This lecture will present the concept of cosmohistory as an alternative tool for
understanding the interaction between different historical worlds in the arena of what
we usually call global history. It rejects the conception of world history as a singular
process, a common history of the human species, a conception which frequently reflects
the ethnocentric conceptions of Western societies and falls into teleological and tauto-
logical traps. According to this cosmohistorical perspective different human communi-
ties with their respective life worlds can coexist, collide, interact, even dominate each
other without being fully absorbed into a single process or into a singular causal chain.
The principles of relativity can be used to understand the interactions between different
temporalities and cosmopolitical perspectives. The example of the interaction between
Indigenous, Afrodiasporic and Western histories in the Americas will show how
cosmohistory can lead to better understandings of processes such as colonialism,
genocide and the so-called anthropocene, than traditional evolutionary unilinear
frameworks.