No Nostalgia

Should one believe the news, there is currently a wave of renewed interest in the work of Norman Rockwell sweeping both sides of the Atlantic, as reported by the BBC, on 3 February 2011. Such nostalgic revisitings are not surprising, in light of the current financial crisis and the common need to believe in the possibility of an era when everything was better, stable, and peaceful. Given the current state of world affairs, even more than the fear for one’s livelihood, it might be the fear for one’s life that fuels such nostalgic longings, as the average citizen gets squeezed between the uninterrupted alerts of the “war on terror” campaign and the all too real images of massive civil unrest and violence in the Middle East filling up television screens at home. In the case of Portugal, however, the wave of nostalgia sweeping society has less to do with current global events, even if also influenced by them, than with its own still unproblematized relation to the nation’s recent imperial and colonial past. One only has to enter a bookstore in Lisbon or Porto to note how many new books fill up the tables, dedicated to some form or other of remembering the colonial past or Salazar’s supposed legacy.

Nostalgia is of all times, of course, and it is usually more complex than one assumes. Susannah Radstone’s views on nostalgia as a transitional phenomenon (“Nostalgia: Home-comings and Departures,” Memory Studies 3.3 [2010]: 187–191) open up possibilities for an understanding of nostalgia as a phenomenon, outside of immediate value judgments. In the case of Portugal at the moment, however, what is at cause is rather a form of “Imperialist Nostalgia” as advanced by Renato Rosaldo (Representations 26 [1989]: 107–122). This involves a metropolitan attitude and a seemingly paradoxical longing for that which one has destroyed. So, although Radstone pleads for a neutral view on nostalgia, Rosaldo’s view on the complicities enmeshed in imperialist nostalgia and his call for a political perspective on nostalgia are more applicable in Portugal’s case. One way in which current nostalgia about empire and totalitarianism is able to flourish unchecked, as it were, has to do with a still incipient postcolonial critique and the lack of any systematic attempt at cultural memory studies. Traditional historical studies have always enjoyed a privileged space in Portugal’s academic firmament. However, a rethinking of the dictatorship and of the colonial wars, that is, of Portugal’s engagement with imperialism and colonialism in the twentieth century, under the banner of a teleological view of the nation as civilizational agent, has only barely started. A systematic program or research project on cultural memory studies, especially if informed by postcolonial theory, could greatly serve to bring about a more informed view of the recent past that might curtail the seemingly endless reach of imperialist nostalgia. Until such a project gets started, however, one should note that individual, even if isolated, studies have already begun the process of engaging with the nation’s ghosts that is absolutely necessary if Portugal is to attempt a new elaboration of its polity in the future.

The complex and turbulent relation between History and memory so central to cultural memory studies was made very explicit in reference to the Portuguese case by Fernando Catroga, in a succinct but fundamental book under the title of Memória, História e Historiografia (Coimbra, Quarteto, 2001). Even though Catroga bases his observation primarily on French studies – with a few exceptions of course – and although his work is somewhat dated and leaves out of consideration a good number of studies that might have amplified his discussion, his...