Decolonization resulted in more than half a million Portuguese settlers giving up their life in Africa. Most of them headed to Portugal, where they were called retornados (returnees). As living reminders of an illegitimate history, they do not fit into the dominant post-imperial historical narratives in Portugal and have until recently been invisible within the public arena. This article explores the memorial vacuum left by the collapse of the Portuguese empire and the return, while also addressing the present-day resurgence of retornados’ memories in Portuguese society. For these purposes, the article is based on the concept of non-memory, a concept which relates to gaps in the social memory that arise from the concealment of certain problematic historical events regarded as illegitimate or shameful for the myths and ideologies of national consciousness. Although it focuses on the Portuguese case, this article is placed in the wider context of the memorial place of the end of the empire in postcolonial Europe.

No abstract

Os anos de 1974 e 1975 em Portugal foram anos de mudança e de esperança por uma nova era democrática. Mas foram também os anos em que os portugueses tiveram de se confrontar com os pesados legados do seu colonialismo. Volvidos mais de 40 anos, os “legados negros” do fim do império português continuam a ser um campo memorial repleto de fraturas, traumas e silêncios. A partir da experiência de curadoria da exposição Retornar – Traços de Memória, este texto pretende explorar questões teóricas, metodológicas, epistemológicas e ideológicas relacionadas com a construção de memórias de heranças ilegítimas, nomeadamente do colonialismo português.

ABSTRACT:The study of the urban experience in Lisbon, the former capital of the Portuguese empire, creates a specific observatory to interpret the colonial process and its post-colonial developments. Following an itinerary from colonial to post-colonial times, this article examines the continuities and discontinuities of Lisbon's urban dynamics linked with Portugal's colonial history through three interlinked processes. First, the material inscription of policies of national identity in the memory space of the city since the late nineteenth century until today. Second, the expansion of a network of economic relations that affected Lisbon's industrial, commercial and urban life. And finally, the development of a system of social and political organization, where spatial distribution and civil and political rights were unequally distributed.

No abstract

No abstract

Portugal was the first and the most enduring of all European colonial empires, beginning in the fifteenth century with the establishment of a commercial domain in the East and lasting until 1974, when the fall of the dictatorship in Portugal paved the way for decolonization in the African colonies. Despite the formal end of the empire, a national imperialistic representation of the history of the country persists, immune to postcolonial critique and widely disseminated through school curricula, public discourses, and propaganda. The period known as the “Eastern Empire” came to capture the Portuguese collective imagination as the golden age of Portuguese history, embodying a self‐representation of Portugal – which remains until today – as a country of “Discoveries” rather than as a colonizing center. This chapter argues that the resilience of the established view of Portugal's imperial past is strongly dependent on a preferred mode of representation which is materially and visually based. It looks at the Museu do Oriente (Museum of the Orient) in Lisbon in an attempt to understand how the Portuguese national past is imagined and affected in the museum space through the presence of objects.

No abstract