Retornar ao fim do império

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.

An archaeology of decolonization: Imperial intimacies in contemporary Lisbon

“…This situation changed with the implementation of a large-scale colonization plan after the 1910 Republican revolution, when colonial authorities designed a comprehensive infrastructural program that could integrate different regions, submit native peoples, and facilitate the economic development of the colonies (Wheeler and Pélissier, 1971: 109–128). It was always difficult, however, to settle Europeans and make the colonies economically significant (Jerónimo, 2015; Jerónimo and Monteiro, 2013; Pereira, 2013).…”

Transitions revisited: The end of the Portuguese colonial empire in Luso-African cinema (1974–2014)

“…Whereas engaging with the past of 48 years of dictatorship in Portugal started to gain momentum in a major way around the turn of the millennium (Medeiros 2000;Loff 2010: 99;Buettner 2016: 210), there has been more resistance to assessing the decolonization process and its long-lasting consequences -the spectre of collective trauma in all countries involved still being too powerful and the memories still too contested. But even though they do not figure as prominently in the contemporary memory boom as the dictatorship, the colonial past, decolonization and its consequences have been addressed both in academic discourse and in cultural productions in Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and in Portugal, ranging from scientific publications and conferences to literature and film, exhibitions and commemorations (Arenas 2011;Ferreira 2012;Ribeiro et al 2012;Vieira 2015;Piçarra et al 2016;Peralta et al 2017).…”

“…The topic of the so-called retornados, the Portuguese returnees from Africa, is one the most visible phenomena in Portuguese popular culture today. Literary and journalistic books, TV series and films render visible the social group of the Portuguese settlers, who saw their lives -especially in Angola and Mozambique -threatened by the course of the independence processes and were forced to flee to Portugal during the revolutionary period, where they were often received with hostility (Pinheiro 2015: 179-80;Peralta et al 2017). Cultural products on the retornados are far more than bucolic accounts of the lost paradise of colonial Africa; rather, they function as a vehicle for a political and moral claim of recognition of their place in history as the victims of what is conceived of as a precipitated decolonization.…”

The construction of a web narrative about the Portuguese colonial war: a critical perspective on Wikipedia

“…The research into these memory products is also recent (e.g., Campos, 2008Campos, , 2017Ribeiro andVecchi, 2011, 2012;Antunes, 2015;Martins, 2015;Ribeiro and Ribeiro, 2016;Cardina, 2016aCardina, , 2016bPeralta, 2017;Peralta, Oliveira and Góis, 2017;Cardina and Martins, 2018;Ferreira, 2018;Rodrigues, 2018), and there are as yet no contributions to an analysis of memories produced in digital environments. 4 This article hopes to take a first step towards filling this gap by exploring the processes through which a discourse on the colonial war is produced in Lusophone Wikipedia.…”