Keynote Speakers
The first Keynote of #IFTR2025 will be held by Prof. Adriana Schneider Alcure on June 10th, 16:00!
Carnival in Brazil is the result of the social, cultural, spiritual, political, and economic processes of the diaspora of enslaved people from Africa to Brazil. It is much more than a party; it is a collective ritual, subversive of normative logic, which exposes contradictions, tensions, and social wounds. Although carnival has multiple meanings, variations, appropriations, and strategic uses, we are interested in the historical and political perspective that understands music, dance, brincadeira, and the partying body as expressions of the anti-racist and counter-colonial struggle. The lecture will address the complexity of carnival through a case study: the Cordão do Boitatá street carnival parade.
Find more details on our website and stay tuned!🎉
https://tws.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/iftr-2025/keynote-speakers/professor-adriana-schneider-alcure-carnival-in-dystopian-times
*Brincadeira is a Brazilian term that can encompass several meanings like playing, joking, teasing, games, among others. There is no direct translation in English, and to avoid limiting its meaning, we maintain its use in Portuguese.
The second Keynote of #IFTR2025 will be held by Prof. Erith Jaffe-Berg on June 11th, 16:00!
Prof. Erith Jaffe-Berg will explore the cultural entanglements that carnival and other festive performances prompted in early modern Europe. Commedia dell’arte, which frequently depicted distinctive identities and cultures through performances, is a prime exemplar. Enactments incorporated various languages and dialects, some real, and some imagined as they aimed to capture and represent migratory passages. While such performances amplified difference through stereotype, they also embraced shared experiences in surprising ways. To what extent did these performances serve to cement cultural connection? Demarcate the limits of tolerance? To what degree were they strategic, projecting hierarchy and power? These are crucial questions to be raised and explored during the keynote address in which we consider how this panoply presents a multi-dimensional “culturescape” of festive entanglements.
Find more details on our website and stay tuned!
Link website – keynote speaker: https://tws.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/iftr-2025/keynote-speakers/professor-erith-jaffe-berg-carnival-and-the-performances-of-minority-groups
The last Keynote of #IFTR2025 will be held by Prof. Vicki Ann Cremona on June 12th, 16:00!
Carnival, born within the folds of this civilisation was, through time, appropriated and transformed in different parts of the world by groups of diverse social provenance. Different forms of Carnival festivity, even when originally deriving from colonial importation, constituted an ideal focus for cultural adaptation, giving rise to new celebrations flanking or rivalling older, more historical forms. Taking Malta as a main case-study, this paper will examine the development of Carnival to show the negotiation between control and resistance within a colonial setting, especially in relation to the struggle for nationalism.
Recent history has witnessed the rise of populist trends that see nations folding inward, as well as new forms of protest that have been termed, perhaps too quickly, as ‘carnivalesque’. The key-note will question the limits of the carnivalesque within socio-political contexts.
Find more details on our website and stay tuned!
Link Website – Keynote: https://tws.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/iftr-2025/keynote-speakers/professor-vicki-ann-cremona-carnival-and-beyond
