The traumas of Empire. History, memory and National Identity

Abstract

In this paper we try to evaluate the weight of some of the most important traumas that shaped the Portuguese imperial history in the formation of collective memory and in the construction of the national identity narrative. As reference points, we took successively the disaster of Alcácer-Quibir, the desegregation of the Portuguese-Brazilian empire, the English ultimatum of 1890 and the final decolonisation (with the strong resistances it aroused). ln the conclusions, the paper attempts to characterise the collec­ tive memory shaped by those traumas — seeing in it a wounded memory ar a sick memory, not capable of making the correspondent mooring work. Finally, one makes a brief allusion to the relation between memory and historiography, evaluating the latter's capacity to transform the bipolar character of the Portuguese identity narrative, always balancing between depression and euphoria.