The Portuguese Colonial War and the African Liberation Struggles by Cardina, Miguel;

Short description:

This collection presents a critical and comparative analysis on the memory of the colonial and liberation wars that led to a regime change in Portugal and to the independence of five new African countries: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe.

Long description:

The Portuguese Colonial War and the African Liberation Struggles: Memory, Politics and Uses of the Past presents a critical and comparative analysis on the memory of the colonial and liberation wars that led to a regime change in Portugal and to the independence of five new African countries: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe.

Covering more than six decades and based on original archival research and critical analysis of sources and interviews, the book offers the first plural account of the public memorialisation of this contested past in Portugal and in former colonised territories in Africa, focussing on diachronic and synchronic processes of mnemonic production. This innovative exercise highlights the changing and crossed nature of political memories and social representations through time, emphasizing three modes of mnemonic intersections: the intersection of distinct historical times, the intersection between multiple products and practices of memory and the intersection connecting the different countries and national histories.

The Portuguese Colonial War and the African Liberation Struggles: Memory, Politics and Uses of the Past a major output of the research developed by CROME – Crossed Memories, Politics of Silence, a project funded by a Starting Grant (715593) from the European Research Council (ERC). The book advances current knowledge on Portugal and Lusophone Africa and deepens ongoing conceptual and epistemological discussions regarding the relationship between social and individual memories, the dialectics between memory, power, and silence, and the uses and representations of the past in postcolonial states and societies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

Table of Contents:

Introduction  1. Portugal, colonial aphasia and the public memory of war  2. Politics of memory and silence: Angola’s liberation struggle in postcolonial times  3. The liberation struggle and the politics of heroism in Mozambique: the war veterans as remains of memory  4. Mantenhas para quem luta! Evoking the liberation struggle in postcolonial Guinea-Bissau  5. Monuments to the colonial war: a 60-year portrait  6. Memoryscapes of the liberation struggle in Cape Verde  7. Historical controversies, netoscapes and public memory in Luanda  8. The past is (not) another country: discursive dynamics and representations of the colonial war in digital space  9. Transitional justice mechanisms and memory: a look into Mozambique’s liberation war narrative  10. Western representations of the liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau  11. Who is the combatant? A diachronic reading based on Cape Verde and São Tomé e Príncipe  12. The subaltern pasts of the Portuguese colonial war and the liberation struggles: memories in search of a homeland