Dossier: Banned Images. Censorship and artistic creation in the contemporary Iberian Peninsula.
What is the difference between images that pass before our eyes and those produced by our imagination? Which are the most powerful and "subversive" ones? What justifies censorship? The images themselves, or their purposes and uses? Is it the images that are censored or rather what we think about and make later with them? The tension between visibility and invisibility, between seen image and imagined image, addresses us to the complex relationships between literature and visual arts.
The attempt to control public discourse by legitimizing certain voices and silencing others is undoubtedly one of the main aims of censorship. This is closely linked to the exercise of state coercion and its goal is to impose an ideology under the pretext of protecting society values.
Much of the Iberian twentieth century was marked by censorship imposed by dictatorial regimes (especially the Estado Novo and the Franco regime) that targeted all forms of expression, especially the media, cinema and literature. At the same time, resistance phenomena (either openly or veiled) arise, resulting in movements such as the neorealism in Portugal or the tremendismo in Spain. In this country, after the end of the Civil War, a large part of the intellectuals emigrated, thus building an impressive exile literature, telling an alternative version to the official history of the victorious regime.
Today, in democratic societies, censorship is apparently extinct in the arts. However, complaints that contradict this scenario at international level follow one another. Perhaps we live in a time of intense non-institutionalized, non-legislated censorship that makes more difficult to quantify, contextualize and analyze it. The dependence of art institutions on private – albeit partial – funding, seems to legitimize interference with their programming and activities. Although states set the rules for acceptable discourse in the public sphere, i.e. who can speak and what can be said, lobbies and private groups, in alignment with the state-power, have acquired the power to impose their own standards and ideologies.This is a timely moment for researchers from around the world to face the challenge of dealing with contemporary censorship.
Below are the suggested thematic areas for papers and panels, which must advance understanding of censorship at contemporary artistic creation and relate primarily to Spain and/or Portugal and transnational issues and processes relating to the Iberian Peninsula within the wider Lusophone and Hispanic worlds. Both single-disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives are encouraged and the themes listed below are not exclusive:
-Institutional, political, social, psychological censorship:
* Dialectical Relationship between Literature and Visual Arts
* Book Adaptations for Cinema and VS
* Cinema
* Visual Arts
* Visual Poems
* Literature and press
* Graphic Novels
* Pictures / Images in Books
* Pictures / Images in School Books
* Cartoons
* Posters
* Book as an Art Object
- Self-Censorship in Film and Literature
- Aesthetic Conditioning
- Public Financing and Censorship
Guest Organisers/Editors:
Ana Bela Morais
http://cec.letras.ulisboa.pt/en/research-team/ana-bela-morais/
Bruno Marques
https://institutodehistoriadaarte.wordpress.com/structure/sc/bm/
Isabel Araújo Branco
https://www.cham.fcsh.unl.pt/invdet.aspx?inv=IB_0375
Deadline for sending the originals: 1st November 2021
Submission: Articles should be submitted in the dossier section. Proposals of articles in Portuguese, Spanish or English are accepted. The guidelines for authors and the norms for submission and publication can be found in the online page of the journal, which can be accessed through the links below. We kindly ask you to read carefully the sections before submitting your text.
http://www.dialogosuem.com.br/
http://periodicos.uem.br/ojs/index.php/Dialogos/about/submissions#authorGuidelines
