This book speaks about Europe today: the people, the politics, the history, the memory, the literature, and the contemporary artistic productions. It places side by side post-colonial studies and memory studies, two interdisciplinary areas par excellence in which the call to various networked disciplines is essential to understanding the complexity of the phenomena in question. It focuses in particular on three European areas - Portugal, France, and Belgium, and takes a comparative approach to the colonial wars in France and Portugal, the decolonisation movements, and the transitions in Europe from a colonising continent to a post-colonial space triggered by these movements. It questions these legacies in contemporary Europe and their transfiguration through social, political, and artistic means.

The book will be presented by António Sousa Ribeiro and commented by Helder Macedo on 23 May, 18h00, at Livraria Almedina/Saldanha (Lisbon).
 

About the author

Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, PhD from King's College, University of London, is a coordinating researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra; head of the Eduardo Lourenço Chair at the University of Bologna (with R.Vecchi); research Fellow at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Oxford; corresponding member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences.

Her pioneering studies in Portugal on the legacies of the Colonial War were amplified in the projects on colonial legacies in Europe, MEMOIRS - Children of Empires and European Post-Memories (European Research Council) and MAPS - European Post-Memories: A Post-Colonial Cartography (FCT), which resulted in multiple publications, the exhibition Europa Oxalá (curated by A. Pinto Ribeiro, Aimé Mpane and Katia Kameli), a podcast “Em Memória da Memória: testemunhos pós-coloniais” (directed by Inês Rodrigues) and a database of artists and works of European post-memory.

Her numerous publications include Uma História de Regressos: Império Guerra Colonial e Pós-Colonialismos (2004, 2024), África no feminino: mulheres portuguesas e Guerra Colonial (2007, 2024), Europa Transfigurada – heranças coloniais e restituição (2025); the co-edition of 14 books with Portuguese and foreign colleagues, as well as her most recent co-authored books, Des-cobrir a Europa - filhos de impérios e pós-memórias europeias (with Fátima da Cruz Rodrigues) (2022) and Eduardo Lourenço - Uma geopolítica do pensamento (with Roberto Vecchi) (2023).