LEGACIES OF EMPIRE AND COLONIALISM IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

Description

Placed at the crossroads between the social sciences and the humanities, this project intends to address the many ways in which the colonial past is present in the old European colonizing centers, just as it is present in the colonized countries.

Based on an anthropology of colonial legacies (BENOIT DE L’ESTOILE, 2008), it is considered that this presence, which can be more or less visible, is embodied in material culture, monuments, architecture, archives and museums, in popular culture, in eating habits and music, in political discourses and daily practices, and in the movements of people, goods and images.

The project intends to look at these incorporations, in the way they are socially lived, spoken and represented. Focused especially on the Portuguese case, the project nonetheless seeks a strong comparative dimension, extending the analysis to the framework of a postcolonial Europe, where colonial legacies are simultaneously a field of hegemonies and ideological disputes.

Objectives

• Understand, through the research on theoretically based and empirically grounded cases, the multifaceted forms by which empire and colonialism still live in the mental and social landscapes of postcolonial Portugal.
• Build a solid empirical basis for critically discussing the legacies of empire and colonialism in postcolonial Europe, thus contributing to the development of comparative research on the topic.