In this year of 2024, the 4th RIEC Congress will be held at the Institute of Sciences of Arts of the Federal University of Pará – ICA-UFPA, in Belém – PA, Brazil. Our theme for this edition will be Bodies, Arts, and Cultures Between Marginalizations and Borders.
We start from the premise that it is no longer possible to ignore the extreme violence with which capitalism, in its various forms, launches itself into the capture and colonization of all spheres of life, applying regimes of control over bodies that operate in both the field of biopolitics and necropolitics, producing normative identities that stifle and impede creative subjectivities, subjecting human beings to the hierarchization of difference and indistinction as the production of inhumans. It is urgent to understand the profound complexity of these times in which the politics of death do not overcome each other, but rather rearticulate and even conceal one another, creating zones of obscurity in which their devices of control and domination of bodies, sensitivities, and thoughts can remain hidden.
Capitalist expropriation of resources costs lives, as it always has. The major input for capital has always been flesh to burn in the furnace, in war, in the forest fire. The undifferentiated flesh between people and animals, between people, animals and garbage. But indistinction does not affect everyone. Paradoxically, it has belonging, place, color, gender. The forms of the inhuman persist in the advanced phase of pharmacopornographic capitalism; the capture of desire and pleasure has socially marked vectors, culturally normalized, historically produced.
We must ask: what policies of life affirmation are possible in contexts where, if the relationship between organic life and technology radically alters the boundaries between the human and the inhuman, hierarchies of race, class, and gender persist at the same time? What bodies are possible in a world where bio and necropolitical regimes of life classification inherent to modernity coexist with those of advanced capitalism? How can a politics of vital affirmation, compassion, and care invent paths of insurgency in the presence of body control devices and the suppression of the creative powers of desire?
And, in the midst of all this, what places do we desire for arts and cultures? What do we want to call arts and cultures? How to challenge the successive and deadly reifications of both, so established and articulated to the axes of the epistemic production of colonial modernity and its ramifications? Where and with whom do we divert and dismantle epistemicidal and other necropolitical policies?
It is in this complex configuration that we need to search for forms of resistance and insurgency of bodies, the reinvention of desiring powers and pleasure, transversal relational ethics, possibilities of coexistence, joyful encounters (joy is indeed a power of revolutions).
To confidently pursue projects of possible worlds, it is necessary to invent modes of living insubordinate to productivity and enslavement of times, sensitivities, and subjectivities. To think and act from the margins, exercise border thinking to create critical responses to fundamentalisms (hegemonic or not), recognize the plurality of epistemic traditions, the dialogue between various critical projects capable of producing plural solutions for the flourishing of life, unnumbered exits for policies of death.
Our invitation is for a meeting around proposals to think and act that come together festively in a congress where researchers, artists, and other thinkers have a space for exchanges, sharing, and creative affectations, producing margins and borders as productive but not productivist geo-body-locations.
In this spirit, we hope to meet in Belém for our 4th RIEC Congress.
A bit about RIEC
The International Network in Cultural Studies – RIEC consists of 10 universities from 5 countries (Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Portugal). Established in 2020, the network was formed through collaborative actions already established among researchers and institutions through joint research and training projects, researcher exchanges, publications, and other initiatives designed to contribute to the development of Cultural Studies and the decentralization of scientific production.
Since 2021, we have been hosting our congresses in annual editions, each organized by a partner institution in a different country. The first, held at the Center for Languages, Literatures, and Cultures of the University of Aveiro – CLLC-UA, in Portugal, had the theme Cartographies and Perspectives for the Future.
The second edition took place in 2022, organized at the Department of Physical Education of the School of Physical Education, Physiotherapy, and Occupational Therapy of the Federal University of Minas Gerais – EEFTO-UFMG, Brazil, with the theme Leisure, Bodies, and Cultural Studies.
In 2023, we traveled to Lubango, Angola, for our 3rd RIEC Congress, addressing Interculturality and Social Movements: Race, Class, and Gender. The event took place at the Multidisciplinary Studies Center and the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities – DCSH of the Independent Polytechnic Higher Institute – ISPI.