Children of the Colonial War: postmemory and representations
The project aimed to gather and analyze public and private representations of the Colonial Wars. Research into the interaction between family memory and the collective memory of the Colonial Wars led to a study of the post-war memory. The project also aimed to investigate how memory and vulnerability to trauma is transmitted from one generation to another. In studying the impact of the post-memory of the war on the national imagination, the
project considered ethical representations of the Colonial Wars, opening up new lines of comparative research.
The post-memory of the Colonial Wars — whether in the form of interviews given by the “Children of the War” or the artistic and cultural production of this second generation – shows that, from the perspective of these children,
the Colonial Wars have generated a mechanism of acknowledgement, firstly within the family and later in the public sphere, in the case of authors. Public artistic and cultural production by this “second generation” is an ongoing and expanding phenomenon.
Ministério da Defesa Nacional