The memory, the place and the collective practices of resistance to the Portuguese Estado Novo, namely the resistance moved by the communist camp, have suffered an erosion and an elision that tends to hide them from the historical, political and media discourse on the opposition to the dictatorship. Understanding the memorialisation and spatialisation of this memory, these identities and these trajectories of life and resistance as collective heritage and as practices and traditions of political participation, the presentation will focus on the mapping and reflection on people, places, events and objects that marked these itineraries of resistance and solidarity. On the basis of a research project in which plural perspectives on the place of the resistant and of resistance were mobilised, an exercise framed within public history which sought to give voice and body to these men and women, and of the conducting of interviews with some of these resistants and of the collection and analysis of their personal archives, an attempt will be made to think about the experiences of projects and of community practices with a historical basis as spaces of questioning and of deconstruction of hegemonic and dominant identities. On the theoretical level, we will approach the object of study from the concepts of resonance (Hartmut Rosa), eclipse of the memory of communism (Enzo Traverso) and historical rewriting and revisionism (Enzo Traverso; Dominick LaCapra).
Bruno Madeira is Professor of Contemporary History at the Department of History of the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Minho (Braga, Portugal) and Integrated Researcher at CITCEM – Transdisciplinary Research Centre “Culture, Space and Memory”/University of Porto. His research interests focus on the fields of the history of political ideas, cultural history and the history of the present time.
Fátima Moura Ferreira is Professor of Contemporary History at the Department of History, Institute of Social Sciences, University of Minho (Braga, Portugal), Adjunct Director of the Laboratory of Landscapes, Heritage and Territory (Lab2PT/UMinho) and researcher at the Associate Laboratory for Research and Innovation in Heritage, Arts, Sustainability and Territory (In2Past). Her research interests focus on the fields of Intellectual History and Cultural History.