From Dissonance to Resonance – Reverberations of Public Memory in Post-Colonial Portugal

This thesis analyses the complexities and challenges in how contemporary Portugal publicly remembers its colonial past and asks: how can liberal democratic societies navigate conflicting memory narratives without enforcing an undemocratic choice of a single storyline? These challenges are highlighted through two particularly fervent flashpoints, extending roughly through the years 2017-2020, that crystallized disagreements in the public memoryscape. These sprang from debates around the installation of the statue of the 17th-century Jesuit Padre António Vieira in Lisbon as well as the proposal to build in the capital a Museum of Discovery, dedicated to the Portuguese era of maritime expansion. The thesis reads these problem cases alongside two recent artistic interventions: Kiluanji Kia Henda’s Plantação (Plantation), a proposal for a Lisbon memorial to the enslaved emerging from a 2017 initiative by the non-governmental organisation DJASS, and Grada Kilomba’s O Barco (The Boat, 2021), a performance piece that centres on the remembrance of slavery as well. In distinct ways they provide pathways to resolving these challenges through resonant narrations.
Methodologically, the thesis combines discourse analysis of public debate, mainly opinion pieces but also press, policy statements, speeches and civic initiatives, with close readings of the two artworks. Theoretically, it goes beyond Aleida Assmann’s canon/archive framework and draws on Nietzschean language and his distinction between monumental and critical history, supplemented by narratological attention to differences in modes of remembering.
The central argument is that ethical, democratic remembering requires cultivating affective resonance across divergent narratives rather than enforcing narrative or affective consensus. The two artworks are shown to open concrete pathways for such resonances by potentially expanding the mnemonic canon and allowing for plural forms of remembrance. In doing so, they model practices through which liberal democracies can acknowledge historical violence while sustaining narrative and affective plurality.
Beyond Portugal, the findings offer transferable methods for reconciling conflicted memory narratives and for designing inclusive public memory that underwrites and reinforces democratic citizenship.