Periodic Reporting for period 4 - MEMOIRS (Children of Empires and European Postmemories)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2020-05-01 do 2021-10-31
The innovative character of the project arises from its research questions, never asked on a European scale:
-How does the transferred intergenerational memory of the process of European colonialism and decolonization manifest itself socially and culturally in France, Belgium and Portugal?
-What is the impact of that latent memory on modern-day Europe?
MEMOIRS draws a comprehensive answer to its research questions through the analysis of 160 interviews with second and third-generation descendants of former colonizers, former colonized and colonial-war veterans living in France, Belgium and Portugal, and through a review and analysis of their cultural and artistic contribution in five areas: visual arts, literature, performative arts, cinema and music. The analysis of those various texts and contexts of production points to a relationship with the colonial past mediated by both historical and political knowledge and a strong subjective investment manifest in family narratives in which the imagination of a non-experienced past becomes the privileged ground for identity construction and intercultural role-playing both within Europe and on the North-South axis. MEMOIRS interrogates Europe's postcolonial heritage by offering new insights into the European postcolonial collective memory and history, which is apparently a common history but one that generates very different memories. Issues such as citizenship, belonging, inheritance, identity, racism but also reparation, restitution and denunciation are addressed, generating a new intergenerational dialectic that refuses the pursuit of retraumatisation, while rejecting the logics of forgetfulness. This resignification of the colonial past contributes to a rethinking of a transnational colonial heritage as part of European identity and not as something external or carefully hidden away, or not accepted as a constitutive aspect. This implies a fundamental disruption of historical and narrative paradigms. By reconceptualizing what is at the heart of European identity, MEMOIRS mapped out a new cartography of memory, accepting as a constitutive part of Europe, the memories of those whom colonialism deemed to be other and contribute to a greater sense of responsibility toward the past, one capable of overcoming contemporary social deadlocks and laying the conditions of more inclusive future.
http://memoirs.ces.uc.pt
www.facebook.com/memoirs.ces/
The political events and cultural discussions of the last years and fieldwork - with academic communities and artists who are sensitive to these themes - showed the relevance of MEMOIRS knowledge as an important tool to promote informed and democratic participation. During fieldwork and in MEMOIRS dissemination events, researchers receive the unequivocal feedback from participants that this is the first time they are being challenged as “Children of Empires”. Whereas their older relatives used to be called in to give their testimony, now MEMOIRS challenges the descendants to think about the colonial heritage in postcolonial times. In this process, we have become aware that the interviews we carry out are not just occasions of data collection for a project. They are instances of historical awareness of the interviewees as European social and political subjects and if and how their representative family history is integrated into the history of their country and Europe. For the artists these interviews are also moments of critical reflection, sharing and creation. From these works new perspectives are made on the significance of colonial encounters for the framing of postcolonial Europe's self-awareness arise in a shared and participatory way.