Abstract
Often, to make peace is to forget, as Susan Sontag insightfully claims (Sontag, 2003: 115), but under what conditions and for whom? And how does the selective amnesia about a past perceived at once as grandiose and tyrannical, messianic and violent, contribute to repairing suppressed memories? In our memory-prone present, questions like these cannot aim at a comprehensive resolution and instead require a strategic accommodation. While for some the painful remembrance of the past is still deeply ingrained in both personal and collective modes of self-identification, for others it is the nostalgic sympathy for the rhetoric of past greatness, regardless of contradictions, that somehow helps to overcome a pervasive feeling of present-day irrelevance.
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© 2014 Isabel Capeloa Gil
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Gil, I.C. (2014). Visual Recall in the Present: Critical Nostalgia and the Memory of Empire in Portuguese Culture. In: Segal, N., Koleva, D. (eds) From Literature to Cultural Literacy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137429704_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137429704_3
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