Militant Imaginaries, Colonial Memories.

While previous work has analyzed the mobilization of images after periods of dictatorial violence, my current research project, “Militant Imaginaries, Colonial Memories: The Visual and Material Traces of Revolution and Return in Contemporary Portugal” analyzes this phenomenon in a context where dictatorship and empire overlap.

Supported by a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowship, this project observes individual and collective engagements with images left by entangled historical events: the 1974 Carnation Revolution, the end of Portuguese empire and the return of colonial settlers to the metropole. Drawing on visual, ethnographic and historical methods, I am gathering empirical data regarding how film footage, photographs and documents from institutional and family archives are animated in order to produce new narratives about the past.

Project outputs, including a film essay (The Revolution (is) Probable), a book manuscript, and other public and academic engagements will conceptualize how knowledge about Portugal’s transition to democracy and, by extension, its relationship to the (de)colonizing project are produced and mediated.

By juxtaposing at times contradictory, competing memories of revolution and return, I argue that an anthropological analysis of how the past is visually and materially narrated elucidates how images are mobilized to unsettle closed narratives regarding empire, decolonization and political transition.

As Portugal nears the fiftieth anniversary of the Carnation Revolution and as debates about race and belonging expand, this research opens future avenues of anthropological inquiry regarding memory, decolonizing approaches to museum collections and emergent visual heritage practices, applicable far beyond the Portuguese context.

Project website coming soon at: https://www.militantimaginaries.net

This project is made possible by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program in the framework of Marie Sklowdowska-Curie grant agreement No. 895197.