Fanstamagorias do retorno. Portugal e a nostalgia colonial

Nostalgia, that is, the possibility of rethinking the past without guilt, is a dominant feature of our modernity. It is a way of reusing and remaking the past. Portugal's experience in Africa left behind, with traces that are very evident today, a diffuse constellation of nostalgic feelings for the colonial past. Colonial nostalgia for Africa is a conspicuous legacy in the present and in contemporary cultural productions. Through its tangents with other feelings, such as loss, melancholy, but above all, in the case of Portugal, saudade, nostalgia provides fundamental material for the contemporary Portuguese imagination (literature, cinema, visual arts, theatre) and for the construction of a public memory. Portugal feeds and reinforces a phantasmagoria of return to its African past, which also finds, in internet communities, a repertoire of places for contemplation, revision, and re-enchantment of the past, contributing greatly to the formation of vast and idealised colonial memories and post-memories. But is it possible to rescue nostalgia from its ontological conservatism and, through a radical revision, turn it into a way of constructing the future?