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Biography
Raquel Ribeiro (Oporto, 1980) is a Portuguese researcher, journalist and writer. She completed her PhD in 2009 at the University of Liverpool, with a thesis on the idea of Europe in the works of Maria Gabriela Llansol, entitled: Europe, edenic space - a literary cartography in the works of Maria Gabriela Llansol.
She is also a permanent arts freelance correspondent for the Portuguese newspaper Público. As a novelist, she published Europa (Oporto: Asa, 2002), under the pseudonym Maria David and several short stories.
She is currently a Nottingham Advanced Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham, where she is developing the postdoctoral project War Wounds: Cultural Representations of the Cuban intervention in the Angolan Civil War, which analyses Cuban and Angolan cinema and literature of the Cuban presence in the Angolan civil war (1975-1991).
Research Summary
My current project as the holder of a postdoctoral Nottingham Advanced Research Fellowship (NARF), entitled "War Wounds: Cultural Representations of the Cuban presence in the Angolan civil war… read more
PUBLICATIONS
Chapters in edited books
'A contrapuntal reading of three testimonies of the Angolan civil war from Cuba, Portugal and Angola' in Topographies of Reconstruction, ed. by Federica Zullo and Rui Gonçalves Miranda (Nottingham: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2012) [accepted. forthcoming]
'Marginal, Nomadic and Stateless - Pessoa, Musil and Kafka in the works of Maria Gabriela Llansol', in The Poetics of the Margins: Mapping Europe from the Interstices, ed. by Rossella Riccobono (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 157-186.
'Women writers and their animals: Virginia Woolf' Flush and Maria Gabriela Llansol's Jade, two literary dogs with a voice of their own', in Transcultural Encounters Amongst Women in Hispanic and Lusophone Literature, Art and Film, ed. by Gabrielle Carty, Niamh Thornton and Pat O'Byrne (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), pp. 149-164.
"'A noite a princípio é o homem sem casa': Vestígios da Escrita e a Aparição do Divino na Noite Escura de Daniel Faria', in Jovens Ensaístas Lêem Jovens Poetas, ed. by Pedro Eiras (Porto: Deriva, 2008), pp. 79-92.
Articles
'Imaginary Islands and Migrant Figures - A Comparison Between José Saramago's Iberian Atlantic and Maria Gabriela Llansol's European edenic space', in Beyond Slavery in the Iberian Atlantic, ed. by Dmitri Van Den Bersselaar and Harald Braun, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 88 (2011). Forthcoming.
'Kurika, Rambo e Jade, companheiros da escrita, ou como amar um cão em Cão como nós, de Manuel Alegre, Myra, de Maria Velho da costa, e Amar um cão, de Maria Gabriela Llansol', in Pensardiverso. Revista de Estudos Lusófonos, ed. by Celina Martins, 1 (2010), pp. 95-113.
'An "intercommunion of subjectivities", or Restoring the Feminine and Nature: Reading Three Diaries by Maria Gabriela Llansol, Journal of Romance Studies, ed. by Sinéad Wall and Maria-José Blanco, 9.1 (Spring, 2009), 59-74.
'Texto Nómada, Entre o Exílio e a Reconciliação: uma Leitura de Três Diários de Maria Gabriela Llansol', in A Vez e a Voz da Mulher Portuguesa na Diáspora: Macau e Outros Lugares - Actas do III Congresso Internacional, ed. by Maria Antónia Espadinha (Macau: University of Macau, 2009), 231-239.
'Maria Gabriela Llansol Meets George Steiner: How The Idea of Europe could be a Llansolian edenic space', Ellipsis, 6 (October, 2008), 33-47.
'Buster Keaton - O Quinto Elemento ou o Agenciamento Metafísico do Cinema', in Buster Keaton - Catálogo de Textos, pref. by João Mário Grilo (Lisbon: Edição Fluviais, 2003), n.p.
Book Reviews
'Who is reading? Recent publishing on/of women's writing in Portugal, between feminism, postcolonialism and memory'. Review article for Journal of Romance Studies, 11.3 (2011), pp. 121-129. [forthcoming 2012]
With Rhian Atkin, 'Literature, 1928 - to the present day', review article in Contemporary Portuguese Literature for The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies, 72 (2010), pp. 227-231. [Forthcoming 2012]
With Rhian Atkin and Paul M. Castro, 'Literature, 1928 - to the present day', review article in Contemporary Portuguese Literatu
Current Research
My current project as the holder of a postdoctoral Nottingham Advanced Research Fellowship (NARF), entitled "War Wounds: Cultural Representations of the Cuban presence in the Angolan civil war (1975-1989)", capitalizes on the opportunities presented by Angola's post-conflict stabilization to carry out a trans-disciplinary study of a key facet of the war's cultural legacy. Cuba's military presence after Angolan independence in 1975, supporting Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) against União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA), transformed the trajectory of the war.
This fostered an unprecedented cultural and ideological encounter between the two countries, played out through novels, testimonies, and films over four decades. The project draws on memory and trauma studies to analyse such representations of this encounter and its impact on cultural politics and identity in Cuba and Angola.
I am currently preparing a monograph provisionally entitled "The Angolan syndrome? Cuban literature and film of the Angolan civil war". This book analyses, from a socio-cultural perspective and in the realm of Memory Studies, the impact of the Cuban presence in Angola from 1975 to 1991. That presence left an extraordinary combination of a collective sense of heroism and pride for the participation in Angola, and individual (private) expressions of trauma and resentment. My thesis is that these public and private manifestations, although seemingly contradictory, contribute to current trends in Memory Studies which question what happens when different histories confront each other in the public sphere.
Past Research
My doctoral thesis, "Europe, edenic space - a literary cartography in the works of Maria Gabriela Llansol", is informed by gender studies and theories of postmodernism, in combination with transnational trends in contemporary European literature, to establish a comparative reading of this Portuguese author with writers from other languages and periods (such as José Saramago, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka and Robert Musil). I argue that Llansol, who created an original imaginary universe, named the edenic space, is both recognized as a groundbreaking author in Portuguese literature, and simultaneously, confined to isolation by authoritative voices in Portuguese studies. By emphasizing the problematic labelling of Llansol's work, and by affirming the importance of her concepts in order to read other authors' texts, my doctorate proposed a repositioning of the Llansolian text not only in the context of Portuguese literature, but also in a wider European one.
Future Research
For the purpose of my NARF award, I have focused solely on the Cuban aspect of my comparative research on the presence of Cubans in Angola during the Angolan civil war.
I am, then, going to address how Angola sees culturally the Cuban presence in the country. How can separate decolonization experiences create conflicting as well as contested historical memories? For Cubans, Angola represented involvement in a liberation struggle like their 1959 revolution, but Angola addressed the memory of that encounter differently, raising the question of a mismatch between two postcolonial memories. This key aspect of the Angolan war provokes conflicting memories of Angola's postcolonial history and questions about when a country actually becomes 'postcolonial'. Building on extensive, already completed, research into Cuba's cultural view of the Angolan war, the project will situate the Angolan war within current debates in Memory Studies, moving beyond the usual Cold War engagement to encompass post-colonialism. The project addresses the under-researched cultural legacy of the conflict through the study of Angolan literature and film about the Cuban presence in the war.