Tonya Lewis Lee
Filmmaker
Filmmaking Your Values: Creating work that aligns with your purpose
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Tonya Lewis Lee is an award winning filmmaker, author and entrepreneur whose work often explores the personal impact of social justice issues. Most recently, the film she co-directed and co-produced, exploring the US maternal mortality crisis, AFTERSHOCK (HULU) has received numerous awards including a 2024 DuPont- Columbia Award, a 2023 Peabody Award, a 2022 Sundance Special Jury Impact for Change Award and a 2023 Emmy Award nomination. As a television producer, Tonya served as Executive Producer on the episodic series She’s Gotta Have It (NETFLIX) and wrote and produced The Watsons Go To Birmingham (AMAZON). As a film producer, Lee produced Monster (NETFLIX) which premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. As an author, Tonya’s children’s books, co-written with her husband Spike Lee, Please Baby Please, Please Puppy Please and Giant Steps to Change the World have sold over one million copies.
As an entrepreneur Tonya founded Movita Organics an organic vitamin supplement company to provide a premium vitamin supplement to the marketplace and to continue the conversation with women about how to access and achieve one’s optimum health.
Tonya has received numerous awards and recognition for her work including being named the 2023 Forbes 50 Over 50 list.
Tonya is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, The University of Virginia School of Law and is a member of the Writer’s Guild of America, the Producers Guild of America, the Television Academy and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the March of Dimes and a Board Emeritus of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
She has two adult children and lives in New York with her husband.
Antonio Monegal
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
War as Culture
It would be gratifying to be able to see war as the opposite of culture, and culture as the solution that can save us from war. But the contrary is true: war is a cultural phenomenon that accompanies humanity since its earliest forms of social organization. Which are the cultural underpinnings that make war possible? War happens because it is an option available in the cultural repertoire: to respond to collective conflict with collective violence. Whether this response is rooted in instinct or is a learnt behavior has long been debated, but its justification is arguably founded on a long tradition of epic discourse and on forms of representation that familiarize us with war as a legitimate, inevitable, or sometimes even celebrated and heroic endeavor. From the toys children play with, videogames and films, to the role of wars in collective memory and identity of nations, many factors contribute to our familiarity with war and perpetuate its prominent function in the cultural repertoire. Is it possible to end war if it has such an ancient and well-established position in our cultural landscape?
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Antonio Monegal is professor of literary theory and comparative literature at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, where he coordinates the MA program on Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Philosophy. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1989, taught at Cornell University until his return to Spain, and was a visiting professor at Harvard, Princeton, the University of Chicago and Stanford. He was awarded the Premio Nacional de Ensayo 2023 for Como el aire que respiramos: El sentido de la cultura (Acantilado 2022, translated into Portuguese by Objectiva 2024), after which he has published El silencio de la guerra (Acantilado 2024). He is also the editor of En Guerra (2004) and Política y (po)ética de las imágenes de guerra (2007). He was one of the curators, together with Francesc Torres and José María Ridao, of the exhibition “At War” (2004) and with Alyce Mahon he curated “Sade: Freedom or Evil” (2023), both at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. Between 2009 and 2013, he was the president of the Executive Committee of the Arts Council of Barcelona.
Maria José Lobo Antunes
University of Lisbon
Forget me when this photograph speaks.
War, storytelling, and personal photographic collections of the Portuguese colonial war
Between 1961 and 1974, approximately one million men were drafted to fight liberation movements in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. Conscripted by the Portuguese authoritarian New State regime, these men took snapshots of what surrounded them during their two-year deployment overseas: the barracks, the landscapes, their daily lives, the civilian populations, and the military apparatus. In spite of the military surveillance, soldiers managed to collect and send pictures by mail to family, friends and sweethearts. Massively depicted in personal collections, the colonial war is probably the most photographed historical event of the Portuguese twentieth century. And yet, its visibility has remained limited for decades. During wartime, the regime’s military and press censorship worked to keep soldiers’ photographs away from the public eye; in the decades that followed the Carnation Revolution of 1974, these pictures became uncomfortable records of a contested past.
As visual incisions through time and space, photography offers a window into multiple and changing scales of meaning, from the micro narratives of concrete experience to larger cultural imaginaries. Drawing from both archival and ethnographic research with Portuguese conscripts, I propose to explore the visible aspects of soldiers’ photography and the relational dimensions unlocked by its material existence. Revealing as they may be, pictorial patterns and visual compositions are just a fragment of mass photography’s significance. Going beyond the edge of sight, I intend to examine the affective storytelling they trigger and the ambivalent entanglements of memory, photography and history in postcolonial times.
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Maria José Lobo Antunes is anthropologist and associate researcher of the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon (ICS-ULisboa). Her work intersects memory, history and visual culture, and focuses on Portuguese late colonialism and the wars that defended it. Antunes was a FCT Postdoctoral Research Fellow at ICS-ULisboa (2017-23), where she developed the project Image, War and Memory, which critically engaged with the uses and circulation of private and public photographs from the Portuguese colonial/liberation wars. Drawing from this research project, she co-curated the exhibition A War Kept. Photography of Portuguese Soldiers in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique (1961-74), that ran in Museu do Aljube in Lisbon (2022). She is the author of Regressos quase perfeitos. Memórias da guerra em Angola (Tinta-da-China 2015).
Alexis Tadié
University of Paris-Sorbonne
Writing in the Aftermath of Revolutions
Are Arab revolutions now part of history? Do they belong to this body of events which provide material for historical novels? Or does their status, not-so distant, not-quite over yet enable us to view them in a different light? In the face of these revolutions, there has been a renewed sense of urgency, on the part of writers, to address and not only to document, to engage through fiction with the events that unfolded in 2011, and since. This talk will look at the English writings of authors from Egypt, Lybia, Syria which address the 2011 revolutions. In the context of commentaries on the Arab revolutions, which have sometimes portrayed these as unforeseen events, the literary text restores a sense of inscription in history. Further, while neoliberal reflections on our contemporary moment portray the present as the only time worthy of attention, these writings return to what it is that makes the present, present. I will outline the ways in which Arab literature in English carves for itself an original space from which to address engagement with, and the legacies of, revolutions. In its exilic and transcultural dimensions, it reconfigures the Arab revolutions as essential moments of world and not only national or Arab history. In its acute attention to the frailty of lives, to the disappearing movement of revolutions, it investigates what constitutes the contemporary and how it is inhabited by violence. Finally, it tries to offer a moment of closure, at the same time as it recognizes the impossibility to do so.
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Alexis Tadié is professor of English at Sorbonne University, Paris. He works on eighteenth-century literature and history of ideas as well as on postcolonial literatures. He also has an interest in the relationship between sports and literature. His recent publications include Le tennis est un art (2020) and an edition of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (2022).
Rosângela Rennó
Artist
Between documents and monuments: strategies to discuss and fight invisibility and erasure.
For many decades, Rosângela Rennó has been using analog photographic material found in public institutions to understand archive and memory politics, or simply the lack of them, especially in Brazil. In recent years she has been expanding her artistic practice by researching photographs on the internet and hybridizing analog and digital documentation to create collections of images of monuments and other objects found in the urban fabric, which reveal stories of vandalism, invisibility and resistance to erasure.
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Rosângela Rennó Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She graduated in Fine Arts from the Guignard School (1986) and in Architecture from the Federal University of Minas Gerais UFMG (1987). Arts Doctorate from the School of Communications and Arts at University of São Paulo ECA-USP (1997). Her work on photographs, objects and installations is characterized by the investigation of different politics of the photographic representation/absorption and of the relations between memory and forgetfulness, by appropriating images from different sources, from fleamarkets and internet photos to institutional archives. Precarious, abandoned photographic archives and even ‘dead files’ have led her to engage herself on clarifying and fighting the recurring narratives of erasure and ‘structural ignorance’, used as a strategy of historical amnesia and exclusion of a large part of the population, especially in Brazil and South Global countries. She also dedicates herself to the creation of videos and artist’s books, always in the same conceptual basis.
Christiane Solte-Gresser
Saarland University
Holocaust Nightmares.
Dream reports as war historiography
Dreams play a central role in the processing and remembering of the Holocaust. The fact that nightmares are predominant in Holocaust literature hardly needs further explanation. Three models can be identified as the most important types of concentration camp nightmares: The dream of being prevented from returning home, the dream of being inhibited from narrating the own experiences and the dream of being sent back to the camp.
In my lecture I would like to present some important examples of Holocaust dreams and reflect on the following questions: To what extent do these dreams contribute to historiography? How do they convey war experiences and especially the subjective perception of the Second World War? What do dreams “know” about war and which kind of knowledge is involved here?
The approach of a poetics of knowledge allows to analyze dream narratives, dream reports and dream reflections in autobiographical texts as a means to communicate experiences that cannot be articulated in any other way. All examples are concerned with the question of how a reality experienced as nightmarish can be put into words and why dreams are an important, even an indispensable aspect of our cultural memory.
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Christiane Solte-Gresser is full professor at Saarland University since 2009 and holds the chair of General and Comparative Literature. There she has been the spokeswoman of the Research Training Group “European Dream Cultures” (GRK 2021, running from 2014 to 2024), funded by the German Research Foundation. She is chair of the German Society for General and Comparative Literature (DGAVL) since 2023. She is also a member of the board of directors of LOGOS, the international graduate school of the Université de la Grande Région. She has held visiting and substitute professorships at the Université Aix-Marseille and the Goethe University Frankfurt. From April 2024 on she co-directs the Käte Hamburger Center for Cultural Practices of Reparation (CURE) with Markus Messling, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
Nelson Ribeiro
Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Media Warfare and (Counter)Propaganda
The media play a central role in contemporary warfare, used to steer hate against those presented as enemies and to mobilize people for and against wars. While the digital environment has exacerbated the speed through which information on war and conflict circulates on the public arena, in this talk I will argue that propaganda techniques developed in the 20th century – “the century of propaganda” – continue to be used today to mold perceptions of war. Even though the concept of propaganda was set aside by most Western scholarship after the end of the Cold War and has been kept apart from contemporary debates on mis and disinformation, I will discuss how it can serve as a valuable construct to enlighten present-day information environment. While propaganda tends to be presented as top-down phenomenon, used strategically by established power structures, it can also function as a tactical weapon used by those aiming to counter the dominant narratives despite being deprived from official political agency. As will be argued, this can assume a particular relevance in war scenarios in which conquering the support of public opinion is deemed essential.
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Nelson Ribeiro is professor of Communication at the Catholic University of Portugal, where he is the Dean of the Faculty of Human Sciences and coordinator of the Doctoral Programme in Communication Studies. Member of the Board at the Research Center for Communication and Culture (CECC), he leads the research group “Media Narratives and Cultural Memory” and is the founding director of the Lisbon Winter School for the Study of Communication. Ribeiro is affiliated with the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE) and in 2023 he was elected member of the Academia Europaea. Presently he is the Chair of the Communication History section at the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). His main research interests are media history, propaganda and disinformation, media and colonialism and journalism studies. He is a co-author of The Wireless World: Global Histories of International Radio Broadcasting (Oxford University Press, 2022) and co-editor of Media and the Dissemination of Fear: Pandemics, Wars and Political Intimidation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and Digital Roots: Historicizing Media and Communication Concepts of the Digital Age (De Gruyter, 2021).
Kathrin Sartingen
University of Vienna
Navigating Conflict: Fiction and Storytelling in the Postcolonial Context
In an era of multifaceted global conflicts, culture has gained a new significance. Especially, cross- and transcultural studies have heightened awareness for crisis of all kinds. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced in postcolonial societies, where historical and systemic injustices are often inadequately addressed or completely covered up. Fiction and storytelling emerge as cultural tools in navigating these tensions, offering a means to confront uncomfortable truths, foster dialogue, and process the legacies of the colonial past. In Portuguese-speaking countries, the use of the common imaginary of the sea serves as such a powerful fictional device, symbolising both historical exploits and contemporary struggles. By analysing various narratives from the Portuguese-speaking context and their employment of the shared maritime imaginary in literature and film, this keynote aims to explore how the sea in particular works as a fictional framework that is essential for addressing unresolved conflicts and envisioning new futures within the postcolonial context, and how storytelling as a cultural technique for collective negotiation facilitates deeper understanding and the possibility of debating diverse perspectives and critical reflections on past and present conflicts.
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Kathrin Sartingen is Full Professor of Portuguese and Spanish Literatures, Cultures and Media (with a special focus on Latin America and Africa) at the Institute for Romance Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. She was president of the German Association of Lusitanists until 2019.
Her research areas are: colonial and postcolonial themes and theories (migration, memory, the sea, identities and invisibilities, testimonial/docu-fictional narratives); narratology; storytelling as cultural technique; Latin American, African and Iberian literature, film and theatre; intertextualities, intermedialities and interculturalities.