On May 30th, at 2:30 p.m., in the Meeting Room of the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Minho, will take place the Permanent Seminary of Postcolonial Studies entitled “Memory, Silences, Power: Colonial War and the Mirrors of History”, with Miguel Cardina.
The reasons for the silencing of colonial violence – and war as one of its particular and final expressions – have their own historicity that are articulated with the way in which Portugal imagined their colonial relationship. More than forty years after the end of the wars between the Portuguese state and the African liberation movements, the conflict still remains in Portugal today, a stage of fragmented evocations and persistent amnesias. The way it is remembered and forgotten attests to the force of an event whose existence is not confined to its chronological beginning and end, and whose presence in the present is revealed both in what is said and in what remains by verbalizing or bringing discussion. In this presentation I will try to show how war, as a historical and memorial phenomenon, has been crossed by different “politics of silence” that constitute a particular and diffuse form of production of “politics of memory.”
Miguel Cardina is a researcher at the Center for Social Studies. He was Vice-President and Chairman of the Scientific Council of CES and member of the coordination of the Nucleus of Humanities, Migrations and Studies for Peace (NHUMEP) (2013-2106). In 2016 he received the Starting Grant grant from the European Research Council (ERC) as coordinator of the research project CROME – Crossed Memories, Politics of Silence. The Colonial-Liberation Wars in Postcolonial Times “(2017-2022). He is the author or co-author of several books, chapters, and articles on colonialism, anticolonialism and colonial warfare; history of political ideologies in the 1960s and 1970s; and dynamics between history and memory.
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