Portugal’s Legacies of Colonialism and Decolonization

Despite the decolonization of the African territories during the second half of the 1970s, the colonial legacy continues to resonate in Portugal, shaping “organized forgetting” of colonial violence. Official ways of remembering the past glorify maritime expansion and redefine Portuguese colonialism based on its purportedly convivial character. Even with a growing number of voices advocating for a revision of the dominant narrative, it remains a strongly operative imaginary. Finding ways to dismantle the real effects of that historical legacy requires confronting such benign representations of the colonial past and its consequences.