Colonial Paradoxes: memory, postmemory and forgetting in second generation narratives

Supervisor/s: António Sousa Ribeiro

Doctoral Programme: Post-Colonialisms and Global Citizenship

Funding: Project MEMOIRS (European Research Council)

My work will focus on the familial and private processes that explain the transgenerational memories about the end of the Portuguese empire. I will explore the dynamics between memories performance and forgetting as they transit between generations. With this overall goal in mind, I will analyse interviews with descendants of families who came to Portugal with the Angolan independence in 1974/75 and compare the memories performance in families racialized as whites and as non-whites. I will analyse which memories are narrated and performed between generations, which mythologies, silences and forgetting are reproduced, looking in particular at the place ascertained to violence in those memories. My work draws on the field of Memory Studies, focusing on the forgetting and performativity of memory as analytical dimensions when analysing memory performance and transmission.