SCENES OF COLONIAL MEMORY: DECAY AND THE RUINS OF MACAU (original) (raw)

Postcolonial nostalgias: Writing, representation and memory

2012

Writing, representation, and postcolonial nostalgia This work reflects upon a facet of memory that has a special resonance for those of us entangled by the long histories of colonialism and decolonisation -nostalgia. 1 Nostalgia is a cultural phenomenon that in an uncanny way connects people across national and historical as well as personal boundaries, yet remains to be fully understood or explained. I call it uncanny, because I cannot think of a better word for describing the strange mix of individual and social desires that prompts the search for past experiences that constitutes nostalgia, and which seems to become prominent at certain critical stages of human history -such as the rise of industrialisation, when the writings of the European Romantics challenged what they perceived was happening in the world by exploring -as Rousseau and Wordsworth explored -the restorative, nurturing potential of memory for the threatened individual; or, nearer our own times, the rise in migration and exile accompanying the end of empire and the disasters of the twentieth century, explored in the writings of those, from Conrad and Joyce to Naipaul and Coetzee, whose fictions represent the present as a place marked by a trail of survivors searching for their roots, for a home, in the ruins of history.

Writing, representation, and postcolonial nostalgia

Textual Practice, 2009

Writing, representation, and postcolonial nostalgia This work reflects upon a facet of memory that has a special resonance for those of us entangled by the long histories of colonialism and decolonisation-nostalgia. 1 Nostalgia is a cultural phenomenon that in an uncanny way connects people across national and historical as well as personal boundaries, yet remains to be fully understood or explained. I call it uncanny, because I cannot think of a better word for describing the strange mix of individual and social desires that prompts the search for past experiences that constitutes nostalgia, and which seems to become prominent at certain critical stages of human history-such as the rise of industrialisation, when the writings of the European Romantics challenged what they perceived was happening in the world by exploring-as Rousseau and Wordsworth explored-the restorative, nurturing potential of memory for the threatened individual; or, nearer our own times, the rise in migration and exile accompanying the end of empire and the disasters of the twentieth century, explored in the writings of those, from Conrad and Joyce to Naipaul and Coetzee, whose fictions represent the present as a place marked by a trail of survivors searching for their roots, for a home, in the ruins of history. Clambering over those ruins, I find myself in a dim, borderline area, an area characterised by E.J. Hobsbawm as a twilight zone. 'For all of us', he says in the Overture to the finale of his three-volume study of the long nineteenth century:. . .there is a twilight zone between history and memory; between the past as a generalized record which is open to relatively dispassionate inspection and the past as a remembered part of, or background to, one's own life. For individual human beings this zone stretches from the point where living family traditions or memories begin-say, from the earliest family photo which the oldest living family member can identify or explicate-to the end of infancy, when

De_colonial? Archives, memory and power

Racialised Faces in white Creative Spaces: Ein Sammelband über Rassismus in der Kultur- und Kreativwirtschaft, 2023

Today I address in particular Black African people-continental or diasporic-who are workers and service providers in museal institutions in Europe. In particular, people who do work that supports or disseminates "decolonial" initiatives and discourses in these endeavors. I think this indication of direction is important, because we are not always truly aware of the roles we play within institutional "diversity" narratives, especially since these narratives are always constructed to make it seem like museums are institutions genuinely committed to education, when in fact they are commercial and rhetorical enterprises. Not exclusively museums, but especially museums, and I will explain myself later. When I refer to museums I mean all "archives of knowledge"all institutions dealing with the safeguarding, maintenance, and diffusion of historical, artistic, or cultural heritage, inheritance, or legacy (whether museums of any kind, archives, galleries, thematic libraries, universities, repositories, cultural centers, etc.). I take license to name and reduce all of these institutions-including museums-to the name Archive. I have done so in many of my more recent texts. I understand that the reason for the existence of these enterprises and their modes of operation all converge on the same original motivation: the articulation of the exercise of power. This is done through the control of narratives about a given fact, theme, biography or context, from a privileged place of enunciation. Thus, generating an accumulation of heritage, inheritance or legacy, and material, political or intellectual capital that accredit these sites to position themselves as "public places of memory". This convergence of factors enables the construction or destruction of a collective memory, as well as the construction or destruction of a collective forgetting. The relationship between these "places of memory" and their referent territories, the roles of the agents...

Turned into Stone: The Portuguese Colonial Exhibitions Today

PARSE: On the Question of Exhibition – Part 2, 2021

Portugal’s two colonial exhibitions took place in 1934 and 1940, the first in Porto and the second in Lisbon. Both exhibitions were set up by the fascist regime of António Salazar, as powerful tools of propaganda that asserted an idea of empire and invited the population to colonize Portugal’s ultramarine domains and civilize indigenes populations. Both exhibitions created a “Square of the Empire,” punctuated by a monument erected in perishable materials, as temporary instalment. In Porto, celebrating the Portuguese colonial effort and, in Lisbon, the Portuguese discoveries. While these monuments were demolished after the exhibitions ended, replicas of each were later re-erected in stone and brought to “Squares of the Empire,” in Lisbon—1960—and Porto—1984. I frame these monuments historically, attending to the contexts of their making, their recreation/relocation and presence in public space. Studying how these monuments—and squares—move the ideas promoted by the exhibition into public space. I engage a diverse body of literature to reflect about how these exhibitions still linger and haunt the urban landscape and collective memory. Telling about Portugal’s difficulties in dealing with its past, due to how the regime succeeded in communicating a sense of Portuguese identity construed on idealized versions of history, that in their persisting memorialization, render invisible other versions, and the people affected to them, in a country with enduring and widespread racism, and inequality. I look at artists engaging critically with the monuments at both Squares—Ângela Ferreira, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Interstruct Collective—and present my own research practice where I study different inhabitations/views of a monument to research how the ideas they air can be seen as a spectre haunting the present, engaging with Spectrality Studies, and “ghost” and “haunting” as operative concepts when analysing cultural situations where there is an erasure, an invisibility, or latency.

Architectures of Colonialism Constructed Histories, Conflicting Memories.

Architectures of Colonialism. Constructed Histories, Conflicting Memories. Edited by: Vera Egbers, Christa Kamleithner, Özge Sezer and Alexandra Skedzuhn-Safir, 2024

The question of what heritage is and how we deal with it is not a neutral one. Recent events such as the Black Lives Matter movement and the toppling of monuments have made evident how much the colonial past is inscribed in our built environment; at the same time, colonialism continues to affect memorialization and historiography. Hence, those involved in architectural history are challenged to re-consider their positionality. Whose heritage are colonial sites? Which possibly silenced memories are attached to them? How are archives and material evidence reassessed to bring forward the stories of marginalized subjects? Following the call for decolonization, this volume explores historical methodologies and shows the entanglement of narratives at architectural sites, bringing together archaeology, architectural history, and heritage studies. A contribution to the current debate on decolonization and memorialization - Interdisciplinary perspectives on architecture and heritage - International range of authors

Introduction: Postcolonial Nostalgia and the Threads of Empires

Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, 2020

In his influential 1989 essay titled "Imperialist Nostalgia" anthropologist Renato Rosaldo declares his "anger at recent films that portray the empire with nostalgia"-identifying the "enthusiastic reception" of Heat and Dust, A Passage to India (1984), Out of Africa (1985) and The Gods Must Be Crazy as the source of his ire (Rosaldo 107). Nostalgia, as the old graffito has it, may not be what it used to be, but thirty years after Rosaldo's broadside, similar products still occupy plenty of space in the Western mediascape. Still peddling the longing for an imperial past, films like Victoria and Abdul, The Man Who Knew Infinity, and The Viceroy's House all share common threads with their 1980s precursors; both A Passage to India and Victoria and Abdul, for example, depict the surveillance of brown bodies in constructed British spaces suggesting, given the success of these artifacts in the West, that the insidious desire to survey the racial other persists well into the twenty-first century. Of course, contemporary nostalgia goes beyond cinematic accounts and in fact seems to pervade contemporary society: in a 2016 article on Donald Trump's design to take America back to its white-only glory, Pulitzer Prizewinner Lynn Nottage described nostalgia as a disease; her diagnosis recalls historian Matt Matsuda's work on eighteenth-century European journeys to the Pacific in which he defines nostalgia as "a physical and mental malady, a quality of melancholy, displacement, and homesickness." Whether or not nostalgia is a diagnosable medical condition, it is plainly resilient as a way of thinking about and representing empire and colonialism. Like the imperial project, nostalgia has gone global producing a network of expected and unexpected longings and of provocations that tend to ignore the violence of the imperial projects. The 2010 New York Times's Vietnamese tour on "Recreating French Roots," the 2015-16 British Channel 4 television series Indian Summer, and the countless advertisements for chic and glamorous tourist "safaris" demonstrate that the disease of imagining a return to the glorious colonial past is still alive and well-and economically relevant, to boot. What inspired this volume was not just the general persistence of imperial nostalgia but the specific contradiction lurking within the imperial design