Nostalgia e saudades de África: fantasmagorias, pós-memórias e reconstruções do passado

Colonial nostalgia represents one of the macroscopic legacies of the Portuguese colonial experience, particularly in the last African empire. Colonial nostalgia, due to its contacts with other feelings of loss such as melancholy, but above all, in the case of Portugal, saudade, provides the contemporary Portuguese imagination with fundamental materials, not only referred to literature (where there is wide re-use of this feeling-concept) but also to cinema, visual arts, music. In contemporary Portugal, corresponding to a sort of a large museum or archive of scattered colonial memories, little or poorly elaborated, the ghosts and phantasmagorias of the return to the African past is fed and reinforced. This past has become on the one hand a powerful fuel for a widely consumed cultural production, on the other, it finds, especially on the Internet 2.0, an ample repertoire of virtual places of revision and contemplation, through reuses and fallacious quotations: in this way, it decisively contributes to the formation of contemporary memories and post-memories about the colonial past.