This is a four-year international bilateral cooperation project funded by the DAAD PPP / CAPES PROBRAL initiative (2019 – 2022).
The project “Discomforting Territories: Images, Narratives and Objects of the Global South” brings together researchers from anthropology, cultural and media studies from Universidade Federal Fluminense and University of Tübingen. The research focus is on how Global South societies, marked by economic and political asymmetries as well as the longue durée of postcolonial legacies, produce what we call “discomforting territories” – that is particular conjunctures of territorialities, subjectivities, affectivities, and corporalities that evoke ill-being, trauma and conflict. From its interdisciplinary point of vantage, the project looks at how images, narratives, social and symbolic practices configure and express these “discomforting territories” and bring to the surface colonial remains and violence, buried and alternative histories that contest and challenge social and political hegemony.
Territorialities in this sense are not understood as homogeneous containers. Following Hasbaert’s notion of multiterritoriality, they can rather be conceived of as complex layers of disputed geographical and virtual spaces. They speak of ongoing political struggles, wars, climate and other crisis, and of the impossible politics of belonging and identity that lead to what Rogoff’s defines as "exhausted geographies". Mbembe’s notion of the “becoming black of the world” shows us how these “discomforting territories” are expressed through bodies, human and non-human subjectivities related to lived temporalities of “multiple durées” that unveil unwanted and alternative temporalities.
