Transcultural Amnesia. Mapping Displaced Memories Amnésia Transcultural

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE Transcultural Amnesprovided by Universidade do Minho: RepositoriUMia Amnésia Tr Transcultural Amnesia Mapping Displaced Memories rtografiaAmnésia de Transcultural Memóri g DisplacedPara uma Cartografia Memories de Memórias Deslocalizadas EDITORS/ MÁRIO MATOS ORGANIZADORES JOANNE PAISANA MARGARIDA ESTEVES PEREIRA Amnesia Mapping Di ocalizadas mories s cultural a Mapping Displaced Transcultural Amnesia. Mapping Displaced Memories Amnésia Transcultural. Para uma Cartografia de Memórias Deslocalizadas Transcultural Amnesia. Mapping Displaced Memories Amnésia Transcultural. Para uma Cartografia de Memórias Deslocalizadas EDITORS / ORGANIZADORES: MÁRIO MATOS / JOANNE PAISANA / MARGARIDA ESTEVES PEREIRA TRANSCULTURAL AMNESIA. MAPPING DISPLACED MEMORIES AMNÉSIA TRANSCULTURAL. PARA UMA CARTOGRAFIA DE MEMÓRIAS DESLOCALIZADAS Editors / Organizadores: Mário Matos / Joanne Paisana / Margarida Esteves Pereira © Edição do Centro de Estudos Humanísticos da Universidade do Minho EDIÇÕES HÚMUS, 2016 End. Postal: Apartado 7081 – 4764 -908 Ribeirão – V.N. Famalicão Tel. 926375305 E -mail: [email protected] Impressão: Papelmunde – V. N. Famalicão 1.ª edição: Dezembro de 2016 Depósito legal: 419705/16 ISBN 978 -989 -755-251-9 ÍNDICE 9 Introduction 15 Introdução 21 Otherselves Miguel Vale De Almeida 29 Five hundred years of silence. An example of the cultural amnesia concerning the Afro-Turkish population of Anatolia Gülrenk Hayircil Oral 41 O olhar da emigração. Transculturação, auto-etnografia e anticonquista no prefácio a Cantos Matutinos de Francisco Gomes de Amorim Martina Matozzi 59 De árvores e álbuns. A memória da imigração e do desterro em romances latino-americanos contemporâneos António R. Esteves 73 Identidade e memória transculturais de jovens portugueses e lusodescendentes na Alemanha Yvonne Hendrich 91 “The other Bulgaria”. The world and us from an emigrant’s point of view Neli Peycheva 101 Viktor Navorski and Sir Alfred. The limits of consciousness on the border of chaos Paulo Alexandre E Castro 109 Recalling the poetics and politics of the exilic and migrant other in some English women’s poetry Paula Alexandra Guimarães 125 In search of gardens and clay. Creativity and displacement in the African diaspora Cleide Antonia Rapucci 135 Varian Fry and Aristides Sousa Mendes. Rescue in Bordeaux and Marseilles Ana Maria Alves 151 “Die Wunde eitert”. The language of trauma, migration, and pain in Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt Dorothea Trotter 167 Katzenberge. A carrier of a displaced memory Ana do Carmo 179 On Deportations of Lithuanians. (Bio)Politics, the testimony of Dalia Grinkevičiūtė and strategies of amnesia Gintaré Bernotienė 195 Stories of oblivion and remembrance. Transcontinental memory in the fiction of Jonathan Safran Foer Fernanda Mota Alves 203 “When we leave, it’s important to leave something behind us”. Constructing transcultural memories in German film Luísa Afonso Soares 213 Dubai. From AudaCity to FeliCity? Elizabeth Russell 227 Notes on contributors INTRODUCTION Regarding transcultural mobility, James Clifford stated twenty years ago in Routes. Travel and Translation in the late Twentieth Century that in the long run no culture can survive without inter-cultural contacts. Thus, any cultural concept based on fantasized purist visions should be abandoned in favour of seeing cultures as consequences of transitory and complex processes of intermixing and hybridization. With this idea in mind, some members of the research group on Transcultural Studies (NETCult), which is anchored at the Centre for Humanistic Studies of the University of Minho (CEHUM), organized an international conference in April, 2015, at the University of Minho, Braga, Portugal: ‘Transcultural Amnesia: Mapping Displaced Memories’ from which stems the present volume. The main objective of the conference was to contribute to the global mapping of the places of memory marked out by human beings who crossed frontiers, whether coerced or not, in different historic periods, political, social and economic contexts. Their experiences were/are rarely remem- bered and much less commemorated by local cultures. The involuntary or premeditated areas of forgetting, the strategies and mechanisms of camou- flage or obliteration of marks and memories related to transcultural mobility, the places left behind and the memories constructed of these places/ cultures by the people that have experienced them or their descendants, were particular topics addressed by the several papers that were presented at the conference, a selection of which is now gathered in this volume. The reader will find here a selection of papers covering various aspects of the complex relations between (un)forced mobility and (hi)stories of memory and forgetfulness, including the keynote addresses from Miguel Vale de Almeida, “Otherselves”, and Elizabeth Russell, “Dubai. From AudaCity to FeliCity?” 10 MÁRIO MATOS / JOANNE PAISANA / MARGARIDA ESTEVES PEREIRA The processes of collective and individual memory have long been studied. Miguel Vale de Almeida considers the reverse side of the coin, speculating on “that which remains in the shadow” after a process of selec- tive forgetting. The idea of “otherselves” and how one’s own internal selec- tive failure to recall serves to render impossible the realization of alternative identities is highlighted through an examination of gender and sexuality, post-colonial identities and the diaspora/Zionism articulation among Bra- zilian Jews in Israel. Gülrenk Hayırcıl Oral looks at the ways the Afro-Turkish population of Anatolia, who first arrived there under the rule of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century, have faced a wiping out of their cultural and histori- cal background throughout the centuries. Oral also focuses on how a new generation is taking every opportunity to restore their cultural heritage in a variety of ways, drawing on the experience of the Afro-Turkish minority living in Izmir and an association working to promote the revival of their cultural memory. Martina Matozzi proposes a reading of the preface to Cantos Matuti- nos by the Portuguese-born Brazilian poet Francisco Gomes Amorim as an illustrative narrative of emigration from Portugal to Brazil in the nineteenth century. The author proposes a reading of this text that sees it as an original contribution to the discussion of the emigrant experience in the context of colonialism, one that, as she argues, is worth recovering from transcultural amnesia. António R. Esteves focusses on narratives of migration and diaspora through a discussion of the novels Árbol de familia (2010), by the Argen- tinian writer María Rosa Lojo, and Nihonjin (2011), by the Brazilian Oscar Nakasato. Esteves draws parallels between the two different narratives by focussing on the similarities found in the two novels as far as the processes of family memory construction in its relations to collective memory are concerned. Yvonne Hendrich takes a closer look at the processes of cultural identity construction that can be perceived in communities of second and third generation descendants of Portuguese-born immigrants in Germany. In order to assess the way communities of German-born Portuguese descendants construct their cultural memory, and taking into account the two cultures in which they were raised, Hendrich examines a group of twenty people with these characteristics. Among other conclusions, the study reveals that there is a tendency of these transcultural groups to look at themselves as pertaining to a mixed-cultural background. INTRODUCTION 11 Reflections on cultural identity and what constitutes “home” in the context of east-west migration in Europe, specifically emigration from Bul- garia, is addressed by Neli Peycheva. Through analysis of the long-running television series “The Other Bulgaria”, which focused on the lived experiences of voluntary emigrants from that country, an assessment of the strongly embedded links between language and cultural identity is made. The effect of direct contact with the other is seen to alter the aspirations of the emigrants and to affect their cultural identity, placing a version of “home” in the emotional memory of the emigrant rather than fixing it in the geographical space of origin. Paulo Alexandre e Castro explores the twin realms of fiction and reality by examining the similar stories of Viktor Navorski in the film The Terminal and the real life Iranian Merhan Karimi Nasseri. Both were retained in the no-man’s land of an airport when finding themselves stateless through no fault of their own. The juxtaposition of chaos and amnesia is examined in this paper. Paula Alexandra Guimarães approaches the theme of exile and displacement by looking at the work of a number of English women poets who have gone through the experience of territorial dislocation from the nineteenth century to the twentieth. She makes a connection between gender issues and the experience of exile by looking at the ways women have used “the functional trope of the ‘exile’ (or the ‘migrant’) to inscribe the challenging experience of displacement in the collective memory of female historiography and identity.” Cleide Antonia Rapucci addresses questions of cultural identity and gender by analysing the novel Ponciá Vicêncio, by the black Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo. She compares the role played by Conceição Evaristo’s writing with that of the American writer Alice Walker, namely in the essay

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