Aktuelles Forschungsprojekt

Im Team: Prof. Dr. Eberhard Rothfuß, Universidade Federal da Bahia - Salvador, Universidade Ferderal do Reconcavo - Cachoeira, Universität Bayreuth 

This DAAD-PROBRAL-funded project will promote a binational research cooperation as it will bring together researchers of the Brazilian partner Institutions, UFBA (Universidade Federal da Bahia - Salvador) and UFRB (Universidade Federal do Reconcavo - Cachoeira) and researchers from the UBT (University of Bayreuth). The range of disciplines covers the methods and theoretical approaches needed to do collaborative innovative research, comparing a large corpus of texts, films, clips and (performative) practices by Brazilian and Mozambican artists and civil society actors that give insight in the creation of a mutual imaginary across the ‘Black Atlantic’ and the ‘Indian Ocean’.

Oceans appear as a source and inspiration, sometimes as a horizon of arrival, sometimes as a place of trauma in Brazil and in Mozambique. Thus, our aim is to observe the poetic flows that take this aesthetic of the waters as an element of their expressive matrices which can range from motifs, metaphors, and figures to aesthetic means that try to capture the fluid character in the rhythm of a verbal/performing/audio-visual text. These poetic narratives are not considered here as invariably romanticized, nor as exclusively linked to the trauma of slavery, but following movements, relations, and ambivalences, in which shades of these extremes may coexist. 
This project will bring together researchers who have worked in various individual research projects on the ‘Indian Ocean’ and the ‘Black Atlantic’ that will create interdisciplinary synergies in the group of scholars working together. This will be the starting point to create a research group – also including academic colleagues from Mozambique – that can build on this project to develop a more entangled project dimension with a larger corpus of data coming from more countries. 
We will set up specific working groups and tandems to collaborate in four thematic fields:

       I.                    Transoceanic Spaces: Approaches from geography, literary, music & art studies
       II.                   History of routes (trading, slave trade & indentured labor) in the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean
       III.                  Literature, Performance & Film: Oceanic Poetics, Tropes and Motives
       IV.                  Visual arts: Oceanic Poetics).