BUALA | African Contemporary Culture

The importance and purpose of memory and legacy, within the poems of Conceição Lima.

martalanca — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:13:59 +0000

Sophia Hinchey

Conceição Lima explores the challenges of being part of a nation with a history of conflict and slavery, showing readers her resentment towards the collective memory of colonial power, whilst also exhibiting hope for a legacy and future that celebrates the culture that has stemmed from this. Lima shows that only through societal remembering and global recognition can colonial memory be untangled from the legacy of São Tomé e Príncipe.

Why did we take so long to hear the Voices of the Afro-Diaspora?

martalanca — Fri, 29 May 2026 21:03:03 +0000

Marta Lança

On the social level, effective political accountability is equally indispensable in the creation of public policies to promote culture and the arts that combat exclusion and segregation, with structural effects on the lives of racialized populations, and not merely symbolic programs that are photogenic enough for reports. In this debate, we proposed to better understand some aspects of Afro-diasporic production in the fields of literature, film, and music, with special attention to women’s perspectives. Given the lack of historical documentation, it is often necessary to work with absences. As a research approach, the interrogative formulation—which acknowledges gaps that cannot always be filled — allows us to keep asking: what did they say? What did they do? What do we still not know? And perhaps also the central question: why did it take us so long to listen?

In the unit's mouth

martalanca — Fri, 29 May 2026 18:33:09 +0000

Apolo de Carvalho

This is not merely a “politics of the belly,” but rather a matter of bringing the belly to the center of politics and, consequently, abandoning the condescending view we hold of the people. Changing our perspective on food, ingredients, and gastronomy — these “unidentified political objects” — and seeking our history through them would greatly assist us in this process of liberation and unity.

Between journalism and public love: telling the collective in times of crises

martalanca — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:19:17 +0000

Sofia José Santos

Without journalism, how would we all know what is happening in Gaza? It is true that we also learn about it through social media platforms like Telegram or Instagram, but the information often reaches us through the work of journalists, including Palestinian journalists. How would we access so many stories about mental health? And how would we connect them as a significant political phenomenon? How would we learn about the cases of femicide plaguing societies? How would we know what happened in the Zambujal neighborhood? Specifically, how would we contextualize the different narratives and information? Without journalism, there would be only images and narratives shared online, without context, from partial viewpoints that are never confronted.

Explain again what it means to be Portuguese? Dino D' Santiago's opera

martalanca — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:51:44 +0000

Marta Lança

Adilson is the story of a rootless Creole. A childhood friend of Dino’s, the dancer Adilson Correia Duarte, known as Bonny and in the neighborhood as Dafos, arrived in Quarteira at eleven months old but remains a stranger in the country where he learned to walk and from which he has left only once. Adilson has never tasted the pitanga of Angola, never set foot in Cape Verde, and belongs to all three places at once without any formal ties to any of them. Angola, Cape Verde, and Quarteira are, thus, a triple belonging without recognition. Like so many other children of immigrants, he lives in this paradox: “I’ve never been there, I’ve always been here, where I’m a stranger.”

What nuances shape interracial relationships?

martalanca — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:11:09 +0000

Leopoldina Fekayamãle

The evils of these processes are vast, and it is important to remember them: the displacement and death of thousands of people; brutal physical and psychological violence; continuous humiliation; the systematic rape of black women, which also led to racial mixing; the mandatory assimilation into what was considered “superior culture”; internal divisions; attempts to erase and ban the expression of African languages and cultures; economic and epistemological violence; racial hierarchies. This was the case in Angola and other colonized regions. I was born and raised in a country where the marks of the colonial regime endure and its vestiges remain alive.

Algorithmic Capitalism: war, chaos, and knots

martalanca — Thu, 21 May 2026 09:32:45 +0000

Stefano Rota

Algorithmic capitalism proposes an operating scheme that is increasingly defined by circular lines that join the two terms, producing scenarios that do not seem exaggerated to define as apocalyptic. The development of AI strengthens that plot, which becomes increasingly evident through stated strategies and actions taken, where nothing must be disguised. Everything finds an explanation in scientific – or pseudoscientific – statements that bring together absolute confidence in technology, religious beliefs, differences between human beings based on the intelligence quotient.

“Nothing stopped them. In the greatest adversities, in the most difficult situations", Women of the Revolution, by Raquel Freire

martalanca — Thu, 21 May 2026 09:24:16 +0000

Josina Almeida

In a time of fierce competition for historical memory, in which the most extreme forces on the right try to rewrite what fascism was, the film Women of the Revolution, by Raquel Freire, is a moment of truth, a point of order at the table. Who tells our story? Who guesses the joys and the sufferings, the griefs, and the charms? Who knows what was in the heart of a child who was killed along with their family in Gaza? Who hears the birds in the morning feeling what overflows the life that fits us?

Latin America is not a pawn without its will

martalanca — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:31:04 +0000

Gabriella Florenzano

What has happened in Venezuela goes beyond the realm of internal political dispute and enters, quite explicitly, the territory of raw imperialism, undisguised, shameless and without any real commitment to democracy. Donald Trump’s speech, in which he announced that the United States would “govern” Venezuela and take control of its oil, laid bare what Latin America has known ever since it was invaded by the Europeans: it has always been about resources, trade and profit. It has never been about freedom, it has never been about human rights, it has never been about democracy.

Is there really a brand-new wave of Portuguese cinema?

martalanca — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:27:30 +0000

Manuel Halpern

The goal of this text is not to redefine the selection criteria of Indie — it's like the orthographic agreement, as long as there's a rule, it works. Rather, it serves as a pretext for exploring the origins of a brand-new Portuguese cinema, in search of those lost roots, that movement, that unity, even if fragile. This is despite the fact that, in a globalised world, we are all inevitably influenced on a global scale. Nevertheless, one should not underestimate the potential of one’s immediate neighbour.