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Crossed Memories, Politics of Silence: The Colonial-Liberation Wars in Postcolonial Times

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - CROME (Crossed Memories, Politics of Silence: The Colonial-Liberation Wars in Postcolonial Times)

Reporting period: 2020-02-01 to 2021-07-31

CROME’s main objective is to produce a history of the memory of the colonial-liberation wars fought by the Portuguese state and the pro-independence African movements. The key hypothesis is that wars, colonial legacies and anticolonial struggles have triggered memorialisation and silencing processes which have their own historicity, according to each country and social-political context.
Moored in the interdisciplinary field of Memory Studies, CROME is divided into two strands: the first looks at the role of states in mobilising, articulating and recognising the past; the second strand highlights the uses of the past and the dynamics between social and individual memories. The intersection of both strands will allow the analysis of the historical role that states, societies and individuals have played in terms of generating ‘strong memories’ and ‘weak memories’, and to identify how the memory of these major historical events have been historicised over the last forty years.
The project was designed to identify how the war has reverberated in distinct times and spaces but it will also look at the entanglements between the former metropolis, Portugal, and the former colonies - Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and S. Tomé and Príncipe. To build this analysis, CROME draws upon different sources - written, oral and visual - as well as combines different Instances and practices of memory production.
Three main challenges drive the project. The first challenge is that of re-thinking the colonial-liberation wars from both a diachronic and a comparative perspective. The second one refers to the operationalisation of the concept of ‘politics of silence’, understood as a set of political, social, discursive and subjective mechanisms which contribute to form selective representations of the past. Finally, CROME aims to examine the processes of memory historicisation and bring about conceptual frameworks able to analyse them.
The progress accomplished by CROME in 4 years and 6 months reflects the dynamism of the research team and its ability to implement the planned research activities, the efficient support provided by the Host Institution and the cooperation granted by the group of academics and institutions with whom the project has established some kind of collaboration in Portugal but also in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe. In this regard, the effective partnerships established with colleagues and institutions of the countries where the research fieldworks take places has become so far one of the main achievements of the project. This fruitful cooperation has resulted, for instance, in the organization of several scientific events in those countries, and the shooting of a documentary in Guinea-Bissau.
The project is present online through our Facebook page account (facebook.com/crome.ces) and a website (crome.ces.uc.pt) which was launched in the end of the project’s first year. By the end of July 2021, the Face page had around 1300 friends and followers and since its creation the website counted 30.500 views.
After a first year of planning the work and framing the theoretical, contextual and methodological boundaries of the project, the researchers initiated the preparation of their first fieldwork missions to Africa, that took place during the Fall of 2017 (Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Angola). In the following year, the missions were extended to Cape Verde (March 2018) and to São Tomé and Príncipe (July 2018). The first fieldwork missions were an opportunity to identify and meet key actors and experts who may facilitate fieldwork development in the following years, to establish partnerships with local organizations and to collect data. Some exploratory interviews with local scholars, memory producers or former combatants were also conducted. The previous work experience and contacts that team members had with local scholars led to the organization of some events with local entities in the first period. The project took advantage of these opportunities to capitalize its promotion in the academic and public contexts of these African countries and create a network with local entities which have facilitated the development of the working plan and goals of the project.
In June 2018, CROME had its first major output, a collaborative book edited by Miguel Cardina and Bruno Sena Martins and published by Tinta-da-China. The book titled ‘As Voltas do Passado. A Guerra Colonial e as Lutas de Libertação’ is a compilation of 47 short articles, written by 51 scholars from different geographical contexts and disciplinary backgrounds, that offer an overview of how important dates related to the colonial-liberation wars have been remembered over the last decades. This book situates CROME in the current debates about the memory of the Colonial War/Liberation Struggles and the Portuguese Empire, by transferring a number of questions from the academic arena to the public space. The book was reprinted in the Fall of 2018 (a total of 1300 copies in both prints). In the Spring of 2019, the book was listed in the National Reading Plan (2017-2027), an initiative promoted by the Portuguese Government aiming to promote reading among children, teenagers and adults.
The second major output was the publication of the book ‘Espectros de Batepá. Memórias e narrativas do «Massacre de 1953» em São Tomé e Príncipe’ (Inês Nascimento Rodrigues, Ed. Afrontamento). The book was launched in June 2018 and offers an analysis of the symbolic dimensions of this colonial massacre in São Tomé and Príncipe, held as the ultimate incident of violence in the islands and registered as the founding event of the Santomean nationalism, by exploring the narratives and memories of that historical event in a diachronic fashion.
It should be also highlighted the conclusion of the first major audio-visual output of the project, the documentary-film ‘Guinea-Bissau: from the memory to the future’. This film was shot during the mission carried out by several team members to Guinea-Bissau, in September 2018 and the post-production phase toke place in the following months. The film was firstly launched and broadcast by RTP África on September 24, 2019. In January 2020, the film was released in the YouTube, with complete subtitles in Portuguese and English, enabling its watching by the general public, through an open platform. (Entire film: https://yout u.be/CYSJA6b3YEM) By the end of July 2021, the film had 9230 views on YouTube.

The work dynamic established by the project in the first 3 years of its implementation set the tone for its remaining period and will result in multiple scientific and audio-visual outputs.
In the beginning of 2020, the pandemic Covid-19 forced us to suspend all the outdoor research activities and the international travels precisely in what would have been the most busy and intense year - in terms of fieldwork missions scheduled – of the project.
Nevertheless, the team saw the imposed lockdowns and the inherent cancellation of presential events and field work missions as an opportunity to intensify the deskwork and dedicate more time to publication tasks. As result, new key cases were defined and research topics explored, resulting on the expansion of the list of expected research outcomes.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the researchers have worked remotely from home, namely analysing the research data previously collected and working on publications, besides participate on virtual events and conferences.

CROME has organized so far 32 scientific events, together with other institutional partners, aiming to communicate with broader audiences.


More recently, after the pandemic Covid-19 broke out, the project co-organized three events that counted with high audiences (one of them virtual):
- Seminar “Tarrafal: art and memory”, with César Schofield Cardoso and Patti Anahory, that took place at CES, in Coimbra, on 17 February 2020. The speakers presented the artistic installations they had developed at the Tarrafal Concentration Camp, Cape Verde, in 2017. These artistic works aimed to address the Tarrafal Concentration Camp not only in its past historical role, but also as a space for the reproduction of continuous symbolic violences.
- “Meeting with Mário Lúcio Sousa – Words and Music” that took place at TAGV, Coimbra, on 13 October 2020. During the event, the author made a presentation of the novel «O Diabo Foi Meu Padeiro», which recounts the experience of the Tarrafal Concentration Camp detainees, followed by a 30-minute Q&A and a music recital.
- Colloquium ‘Guerra Colonial: as Memórias Silenciadas’, co-organized with Cultra and held online on 27 March 2021. The event marked the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the Colonial War and focused the memories of the conflict in Portugal. The sessions were recorded and became available online:
https://crome.ces.uc.pt/index.php?id=18380&pag=33491&id_lingua=2

Besides these scientific events organized by CROME, the team members have also participated in national and international events, both academic and non-academic. In total, they have given 120 presentations up to now. These events were an opportunity for introducing CROME and discussing its main conceptual proposals and preliminary findings. Considering the aforementioned scientific events, the activities of the project have reached nearly 12.000 people so far. On other hand, the documentary-film ‘Guinea-Bissau: from the memory to the future’ had by the end of July, more than 9300 views on You Tube.
In terms of publications, by the end of July 2021, the project has already published 2 books, 1 special issue, 17 book chapters, 12 articles (in national and international peer-review journals) and 20 other texts. Moreover, while some publications are forthcoming, other are currently under review in top ranking peered reviewed journals or being written.
CROME’s main challenge and conceptual innovation is to produce ground-breaking knowledge about the memories of the wars fought by the Portuguese state and pro-independence African movements between 1961 and 1974/5 from a diachronic perspective.
CROME will contribute to the ongoing conceptual and epistemological discussions in the interdisciplinary field of Memory Studies regarding the relationship between social and individual memories; memory and (inter)subjectivity; building war memories (and silencing processes); and the role played by tools such as social media in generating new historiographical sources. The contribution of the project in this matter is particularly relevant for advancing the field of memory studies in post-colonial societies. CROME’s ethnographic research and fieldwork have promoted the discussion, reconceptualization and enlargement of some theoretical frameworks and concepts such as ‘counter-memories’, ‘mnemohistory’, ‘mnemonic signifier’ and ‘memoryscape’. It has enriched the debates about memory in the public space and between space, memory and power.
Miguel Cardina, Principal Investigator
Luanda, War Memorial
Book and roll up CROME
Bissau, Talhão da Liga dos Combatentes
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