The Children of the Colonial War: Post-Memory and Representations

The chapter summurizes and develops the theoretical framework of the interdisciplinary project "The Children of the Colonial War: Post-memory and Representations", conducted in collaboration with the Faculty of Medicine of Porto and the Military Hospital of Coimbra. The research, in the field of Humanities, has deepened some critical topics on the Colonial War in Africa and, in particular, the problem of trauma experience representations inside the private dimension of a family context. The narratives derived from the testimonies of ex-combatants' sons were studied and discussed in a critical review of the perspective of the so called "post-memory", redefining the space of traumatic memory transmission ralated to the Colonial War, the memory of those who did not experience, but grew up immersed in their parents' pain and narratives of war.