Reparation Restitution And The Politics Of Memory A Methodological And Historical Introduction

Reparation, Restitution, and the Politics of Memory / Réparation, restitution et les politiques de la mémoire

Over the past roughly two decades, the interconnected concepts of reparation, restitution, and commemorative culture have gained renewed momentum – in academic discourse as much as in activist, artistic, and political contexts. This development insists on a critique of the material and systemic conditions of societies and global relations. In their 2018 report on the restitution of looted cultural artifacts, for example, Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr discuss restitutions in the light of a new ethics of relations. Individual acts of restitution, but also the processes of material and immaterial reparation that go with them, are viewed as mediators in the by definition irreparable legacy of colonialism and its present repercussions. A new ethics of relations might even go beyond anthropocentrism: The destruction of nature in the Anthropocene and the destruction of humanity that is colonialism both require a fundamental questioning of the premises of western modernity and a radically different relationship to the world. The present volume aims to examine different discourses and practices of reparation, bringing together perspectives from cultural studies, memory studies, post- or decolonial studies as well as literary studies. Chapters from these disciplines are complemented by contributions from the fields of philosophy, art, and literature in order to explore the multiple facets of reparation. With contributions by Kader Attia, Lucia della Fontana, Ibou Coulibaly Diop, Alexandre Gefen, Hannah Grimmer, hn. lyonga, Helena Janeczek, Markus Messling, Clément Ndé Fongang, Aurélia Kalisky, Fabiola Obame, Angelica Pesarini, Aurore Reck, Olivier Remaud, Patricia Oster-Stierle, Sahra Rausch, Igiaba Scego, Ibrahima Sene, Christiane Solte-Gresser, Jonas Tinius.

Reparation, Restitution, and the Politics of Memory. A Methodological and Historical Introduction

Global Histories of the Portuguese Revolution

The Portuguese revolution marked the closure of the country's five-centuries of imperial history as well as its 48-year authoritarian period, a dramatic moment of political radicalization and social conflict that took place against the backdrop of rapid social transformation in an increasingly globalised world. This collection goes beyond the limits of national history to locate the revolution at the intersection of transnational historical phenomena such as the long 1960s, the Cold War, the emergence of the 'Third World' and postwar modernization. Foregrounding the complex geographies and chronologies of semi-peripheral Portugal, this book combines its status as the centre of a global Empire with its subaltern position in Europe. Offering a new, global, approach to this still understudied event, chapters explore transnational socialist and grassroots forms of solidarity, processes of global communication and Cultural Revolution, decolonization, feminism, and socio-economic transformations to offer a non-Eurocentric global history from within Europe itself.