Visual Recall in the Present: Critical Nostalgia and the Memory of Empire in Portuguese Culture

Abstract

Often, to make peace is to forget, as Susan Sontag insightfully claims (Sontag, 2003: 115), but under what conditions and for whom? And how does the selective amnesia about a past perceived at once as grandiose and tyrannical, messianic and violent, contribute to repairing suppressed memories? In our memory-prone present, questions like these cannot aim at a comprehensive resolution and instead require a strategic accommodation. While for some the painful remembrance of the past is still deeply ingrained in both personal and collective modes of self-identification, for others it is the nostalgic sympathy for the rhetoric of past greatness, regardless of contradictions, that somehow helps to overcome a pervasive feeling of present-day irrelevance.