Synopsis

Passados reapropriados: pós-memória e literatura (2022) comments on the richness of literary representations of post-memory in the postcolonial context. Based on a selection of authors from Portugal, France and Belgium, studied within the project «MEMOIRS - Children of Empires and European Postmemories», the book is interested in some of the themes common to the writings of these three countries, in particular issues on the re-enactment of specters and colonial myths in these works, as well as the re-appropriation of colonial memories through a new reading of the images and archives of that period. Equally, this essay focuses on the modalities of the configuration of post-memory in literature, and namely on the nature of the connection that the seven selected authors maintain with the past of their respective countries. This book explores the specific situations in which the memory of colonialism is represented, in literature, beyond the existence of a biographical link between the descendant author and the familial past, thus appealing to a transmission of a cultural type. In sum, Passados reapropriados: pós-memória e literatura intends to show the dynamics and potentialities of the narrative device to represent, in the spatio-temporal reality of fiction, the intergenerational transfers of the European colonial trauma.

About the author

Felipe Cammaert is a researcher at the Centre for Languages, Literatures and Cultures (CLLC/DLC), University of Aveiro. He was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, under the project «MEMOIRS - Children of Empires and European Postmemories» (2018-2021) and at the National Library of Colombia (2015-2016), among others. He holds a PhD in Romance Studies and Comparative Literature from the University Paris-Nanterre, with a thesis on the representations of memory in the work of António Lobo Antunes and Claude Simon. He has taught at the Universities of Picardie (France), Lisbon, Aveiro (Portugal) and Los Andes (Colombia). He is also a translator from French and Portuguese of contemporary authors for Latin America. In 2021, he received a mobility grant for literary translators under the i-Portunus programme (Creative Europe - European Commission).

_{Cover image: Mário Faria, medical militia ensign, Mozambique, 1968 | © Private archive of Paulo Faria (Courtesy of the author).}