From testimony to memory: gender and racial identity in Portuguese women’s post-colonial literature and cinema

Ene-Mitrović, Irina Elena (2022) From testimony to memory: gender and racial identity in Portuguese women’s post-colonial literature and cinema. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

From Testimony to Memory: Gender and Racial Identity in Portuguese Women’s Post-Colonial Literature and Cinema investigates post-colonial cultural encounters in a series of literary, cinematographic and artistic productions belonging to two generations of Portuguese female writers and directors, pointing out the tensions between these generations in their construction of identity through the prism of social class, gender and race. The first three chapters explore Lídia Jorge’s A Costa dos Murmúrios (1988) and Teolinda Gersão’s A Árvore das Palavras (1997), two novels representative of the Portuguese experience of Africa that shaped the construction of female identity during the Estado Novo. Each chapter is centred on the analysis of social, gender and racial identity, exposing the tensions between the recording of history and the role of memory. The second part shifts from literature to cinema and theatrical performance, concentrating on the works of three contemporary directors, Filipa César, Margarida Cardoso and Joana Craveiro. The analysis includes Filipa César’s feature-film Spell Reel (2017) and short-films Conakry (2013), Mined Soil (2014) and Compost Archive (2016), Margarida Cardoso’s documentaries Natal 71 (1999) and Kuxa Kanema (2003) and feature-film Yvone Kane (2014), and Joana Craveiro’s 2017 practice-as-research doctoral thesis and the accompanying theatrical performance, A Live/Living Museum of Small, Forgotten and Unwanted Memories – Performing Narratives, Testimonies and Archives of the Portuguese Dictatorship and Revolution. Concentrating on questions of memory transmission and the legitimacy of official history, the last three chapters explore the use of archive, the critique of power and the shift in social, gender and racial perspective in these works. As the focus switches from testimony to memory between the two generations, my research addresses the tensions between these generations of women and the way in which their optics change, exploring the similarities and the differences between the two generations in their portrayal of identity.

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