Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Building upon Wayne Modest’s work on the representation of Caribbean and enslaved people in the British Museum, this article examines the representation of Caribbean plantations in several British establishments, the Museum of London Docklands, the National Maritime Museum, the Mshed Museum, the Georgian House, and the International Slavery Museum. Drawing on Black feminist works on race, geography and identity, I argue that these museums create a homogenised vision of the Caribbean, which results in a homogenised depiction of enslaved peoples. Specifically, resistance to slavery is presented as a largely masculine endeavour and taking place only in terms of military conflict. Indeed, representations of enslaved women are largely absent in many of these museums. Only the International Slavery Museum achieves a complex rendering of the Caribbean by pushing against the limitations of abolitionist produced representations of the Caribbean and incorporating models and a multifaceted range of testimonies, including that of enslaved women.

Slavery and colonialism, by the way they manifested themselves on constrained social groups, would hardly indicate the prevalence of their traits in the post-colonial period, specifically in the territoriesin which contemporary generations to their course suffered brutal abuse due to two processes. In fact, due to its inhuman character, even when approached, this act would manifest itself in the framework of hibernated or deliberately silenced collectivememories, in order to avoid animosities. In other situations, revisiting them would be in the context of preventing similar processes from happening again. However, a circumspect look at the ways of certain individual and collective practices are manifestedmakes it possible to identify ways of being that, at the time of their occurrence, constituted essential foundations of slavery and colonialism, conditioning that unwanted memories of these two processes characterize part of everyday life in Mozambique today.

Through a discursive analysis of its founding documents, curatorial project, visual and exhibiting rhetoric and the objects that gradually integrated its collection, this article critically addresses the way in which colonialism and its afterlives are thought and displayed (or not) at the House of European History, in Brussels. This museum inaugurated in 2017 under the initiative of the European Parliament with the goal of telling a “transnational history of Europe and the European integration” in order to “reinforce the conscience of European cultural and civilizational heritage”. The article explores how this museum translates the persistence of a colonial episteme in the present, which feeds on an alleged “common European past” by dislocating it without naming it, and, in doing so, shaping its complex. The article also seeks to answer the following question: how does the recently inaugurated House of European History acknowledges (or not) colonialism as the most common and shared experience of European national histories? And how is this museum answering (or not) the recent demands for reparations and welcoming all of those who have always inhabited the European territory?

The study of colonial dwellings in Haiti can contribute to the research on the meaning of the traces of the past in the understanding of present problems. These historical vestiges, which are rehabilitated, reappropriated, neglected, patrimonialized, musealized, instrumentalized, mediatized, or ignored, experience various forms and logics of patrimonialization and memorialization that bring together different ordinary and institutional actors. This article is the result of an ethnographic field study conducted in the heart of a dozen potential places of memory. It analyzes how the historical traces of slavery can become heritage, but also how colonial heritage needs to be remembered in order to exist in Haiti. The aim is to highlight the appropriations and claims to identity that are the result of social struggles, memory conflicts, and political conflict, all of which are the legacy of historical antagonisms in postcolonial societies.

Review of Samuel Merrill, Emily Keightley and Priska Daphi, eds., Social Movements, Cultural Memory and Digital Media: Mobilising Mediated Remembrance. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 298 pp.

Critically re-evaluating major events in the national past, such as colonialism, is a global trend. The recent developments in Fijian colonial memory follow this trend. Theories of cosmopolitan memory and the subsequent theoretical development of a relationship between cosmopolitan memory with internationalised norms and the local and national reaction to it suggest that memory scholars examine local contexts to understand the adoption (or lack of adaptation) of a cosmopolitan memory. This study considers the memory of girmit, the indentured labour system, one of the most visible colonial legacies in Fiji. The paper examines why Fijians re-evaluated their colonial legacies in the 2010s. Through an analysis of collective memory, this study argues that Fiji did not simply follow the global trend of the re-evaluation of colonial history, but reconceptualises the cosmopolitan memory into a social and political agenda.

This is a posthumous essay by the sociologist Fernando Ampudia de Haro, who died in 2022. Fernando Ampudia de Haro concluded his PhD at the Universidade Complutense de Madrid with a thesis that gave origin to the book Las bridas de la conducta: una aproximación al proceso civilizatorio español (Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas / Siglo XXI Editores, 2007). He was also the author, among other works, of O processo civilizacional da tourada. Guerreiros, cortesãos, profissionais …e bárbaros? (Lisboa: Imprensa de História Contemporânea, 2020). He was a professor in Salamanca, at the Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas and at Universidade Europeia, being also a postdoctoral researcher at the Instituto de História Contemporânea, where he developed the project “O homem civilizado em Espanha e Portugal: Modelos de comportamento e afectividade nas ditaduras de Franco e Salazar”. 

Review of Elke Weesjes, Growing Up Communist in the Netherlands and Britain. Childhood, Political Activism, and Identity Formation. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021, 293 pp.

Roundtable with Patrícia Martins Marcos, Pedro Schacht Pereira, Rui Gomes Coelho, and Victor de Barros, introduced and conducted by Inês Beleza Barreiros, researcher at ICNOVA (NOVA FCSH), editor of the publication La Rampa. Art, Life & Beyond and Portuguese co-manager of the European project TRACTS – “Trace as a Research Agenda for Climate Change, Technology Studies, and Social Justice”.

In the Republic of Ecuador, the freedom of association for the community in general is guaranteed and recognized. This means that those who reach the minimum age to access labor rights can join a workers' union from the age of fifteen. However, there is a discrepancy in the ordinary law, specifically in Article 440, third paragraph of the Labor Code, which allows minors under the age of fifteen and over the age of fourteen to be part of a union. This raises legal uncertainty, as the legal capacity of an adolescent to be part of a workforce is determined by their age, as established in the Civil Code. This normative error in the Labor Code is not in line with the provisions of the Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador. Therefore, the objective of this study is to demonstrate the need to reform Article 440, third paragraph of labor legislation to align it with the constitutional norm. This is necessary to establish hierarchical respect and ensure the proper inclusion of minors in a workers' organization. To achieve this objective, a descriptive-explanatory research methodology with a qualitative approach is used. The information is analyzed through a focused group discussion to demonstrate the lack of legal certainty when interpreting said regulation.