ABSTRACT
Placed in the wider scope of post-war European decolonisation migrations, The Retornados from the Portuguese Colonies in Africa looks at the "Return" of the Portuguese nationals living in the African colonies when they became independent.
Using an interdisciplinary research agenda, the book presents a collection of research essays written by experts in the fields of anthropology, history, literature and the arts, that look at a wide range of memory narratives through which the Return—as well as the experiences of war, violence, loss and trauma—have been expressed, contested and internalised in the social realm. These narratives include testimonial accounts from the so-called retornados from Africa and their descendants, as well as works of fiction and public memory—novels, television series, artworks, films or social media—that have come to mediate the public understanding of this past. Through the dialogue between these different narrative modes, this book intends to explore the interplay between official memory, the lived experience and fiction, thus contributing to build an empirical basis to critically discuss the memory of the end of the Portuguese empire within postcolonial Europe.
This book will be of great interest to postgraduates, researchers and academics, most notably the ones working in the fields of postcolonial studies, cultural studies and memory studies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|91 pages
Narratives of History and Memory
part II|98 pages
Literature and the Workings of Imagination
chapter 5|23 pages
Acoustic Remains
chapter 6|21 pages
The Frizzy Hair of the Retornados
chapter 8|30 pages
Retornadiana
part III|82 pages
Media and Cultural Memory
chapter 9|18 pages
Historical Reflexivity and Artistic Reflexivity
chapter 10|22 pages
Negotiating the End of the Portuguese Empire
chapter 12|21 pages
Connected Colonial Nostalgia
part IV|106 pages
Rewritings and Artistic Appropriations