[ANPPOM-Lista] CFP: Arts and Models of Democracy in Post-Authoritarian Iberian Peninsula, Huddersfield, 28–29 Nov. 2019

[Carlos Palombini]

The process of democratisation in Portugal and Spain originated from a
similar socio-political context. Besides having an almost identical
geographical context, two long authoritarian and military dictatorships
shaped the two counties on the basis of a nationalist and deeply catholic
identity. From the point of view of popular culture, both dictatorships
promoted a disengaged culture, based on songs, football matches, bullfights
and the stereotypes of Iberian folklore. In the early 1970s, the illiteracy
rate and cultural practices indexes in both countries were still among the
highest in Europe. Despite these similar starting conditions, the
Portuguese transition to democracy was very different from that of Spain;
whereas Portugal created a rupture with the previous institutional context
through a military coup, in Spain the post-Franco democratisation was
founded on negotiated reform. These two processes of transition to
democracy in Portugal and Spain, although dissimilar from each other, led
to new ways of both high and popular cultural expressions. As a result, the
decade following the two dictatorships was characterised by significant and
euphoric experiments in the fields of literature, visual and plastic arts,
cinema and music. Scholars have paid scant attention to the ways in which
artists thought and put into practice the very notion of democracy in these
years. Democracy is a highly contested category, one that has been imagined
in many different ways, and any particular realisation of which carries
costs as well as benefits. According to the historian of democracy Pierre
Rosanvallon (2008), the rise of a democracy entails both a promise and a
problem for a society.

This two-days conference aims to innovatively question how artistic
practices and institutions formed ways of imagining democracy and by what
means arts and culture participate in the wider social struggle to define
freedom and equality for the post-Estado Novo and post-Francoist period:
how did artistic practices instantiate ideas of democracy in this context?
Inversely, how did such democratic values inform artistic practice? How did
Portuguese and Spanish artists and intellectuals negotiate between creative
autonomy and social responsibility? And more broadly, what is the role of
culture in a democracy? The core purpose of the conference is to bring
scholars together from different subject areas and exploring any artistic
practice (literature, visual and plastic arts, cinema and music). PhD
students, early careers and senior researchers are invited to submit an
abstract to engage in an interdisciplinary and comparative debate on how
the field of culture framed different ideas of democracy in the Iberian
post-authoritarian transitions during the 1970s and early 1980s. Papers
will be 30-minutes in length with 15 minutes of discussion time, to enable
the fullest exchange. Please submit proposals (300 words) and a short bio
to I.ContrerasZubillaga(at)hud.ac.uk and g.quaggio(at)sheffield.ac.uk by
the deadline Friday 31 May 2019. The programme will be announced in early
July.

https://intlconference.wixsite.com/art-demo-iberianpen

-- 
carlos palombini, ph.d. (dunelm)
professor de musicologia ufmg
professor permanente ppgm-unirio