Práticas da História. Journal on Theory, Historiography and Uses of the Past

The Image and Representation of Colonialism in the 1974 PAIGC History Textbook

2023-10-23T11:38:25+01:00

Textbooks have been the subject of intense academic debate in recent decades worldwide. Mainly around their role in transmitting educational content and knowledge.
This article analyses the image and representation of Western European colonialism and Portuguese colonialism, stricto sensu, in the textbook História da Guiné e Ilhas de Cabo Verde, published by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands (PAIGC) in 1974.
In its eagerness to challenge and contest the colonial logic and Portuguese rule in Guinea (Bissau), the PAIGC invested, practically from the beginning of the armed struggle for national liberation, in teaching whose primary objective was to exclude the reproduction of the colonial mentality through the publication of textbooks with new content. The aim was to deconstruct a certain “glorious” colonial past to challenge European imperialism and build a new narrative based on new actors and protagonists in history and discourse.

Representations of Portugal in Cape Verdean Elementary School Textbooks (1975-1990)

2023-11-15T15:22:10+00:00

The African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde (PAIGC) planned to build a new education system, combating colonial legacies. A content analysis of ten primary school textbooks adopted in Cape Verde between 1975 and 1990 on how they represented Portugal is a relevant angle to ascertain the fulfilment of this desideratum.
In the reading textbooks adopted in 1975, there is no reference to Portugal as a former colonizer. In the history textbook of the same period, the Portuguese are characterized as peoples who committed “crimes against the dignity of the human being”, who “did not respect our people”, and authors of “barbaric exploitation”.
In the textbooks of the early 1980s, there are rare incidences on colonization. The approximation of Cape Verde’s historical and cultural values to Portugal is noteworthy, in close parallelism with diplomatic and cooperation interests with Portugal.

The “discovery” of Brasil in the school textbooks adopted in Angola and Mozambique (1960-1970)

2023-10-11T13:31:43+01:00

In this investigation we will analyze a set of reading school textbooks intended for Elementary and Complementary Primary Education in overseas schools in Angola and Mozambique published between the 1960s and 1970s. Our main objective is to examine how the contents about Portuguese “discoveries” in general, and Brazilian case, in particular, were developed within this bookish universe. We will explore how these approaches met the political and ideological principles of self-defense of the Portuguese imperial State in the last decades of the Portuguese New State government. Also, we will see how Gilberto Freyre's theses about the Brazilian prototype of a harmoniously mixed nation were adapted for this purpose. Finally, we will build an analogy about the representation of “gentiles”, or native peoples of “pre-cabraline” Brazil, with the vision constructed about the “indigenous” peoples of Angola, Mozambique and/or other areas of the western African coast. To conclude, we will discuss how these educational supports reflected the images of the original culture of their own recipients and we will consider their implications for the subjectivation of identity of their target audience.

History Handbooks in Mozambique: Circulation of Models and Knowledge Practices

2023-10-09T10:30:32+01:00

The aim of this article is to analyze the formation of a Mozambican social thought in didactic handbooks. The analysis focuses on a history handbook in the specific format of exercises application, História. O meu caderno de actividades (History. My Activity Book), published in 2021 and aimed at the 9th grade class. Our main purpose is to discuss the conditions of national self-images production in the midst of a didactic narrative about the consequences of capitalism on colonization and slavery, with an emphasis on resistance struggles and on what post-independence social life became.

Narrating, Questioning, and Reimagining the Past through Textbook Images

2023-10-30T13:33:31+00:00

Many studies on textbooks have already highlighted their role as an artifact that construes knowledge and sensibilities, serving beyond the mere record of information. In this sense, it is important to look not only at the verbal texts, but also at the images disseminated in the textbooks since these images are important vectors in the establishment of a visual memory of the past. For decades, textbooks have been used for dissemination of powerful images, such as engravings by travelers who have visited Brazil, and historical paintings produced in the 19th century. As part of a movement of critical revisionism of Brazilian history, several contemporary visual artists have looked at these iconographies and have proposed new readings oriented toward construing new visualities. The aim of this study is to understand how textbooks also compose this debate since they have attracted the attention of some Brazilian visual artists, who are driven to review and question a certain visual culture that has been reified in their pages. Thus, the study attempts to map their criticisms and to analyze the potentiality of including this contemporary artistic production in textbooks.

Media Culture and School Textbooks: The place of Brazilian and Portuguese History Magazines

2023-10-16T16:27:45+01:00

This study discusses Portuguese and Brazilian history magazines in circulation for the last 20 years. Understanding the History magazines as potential educational media products, what elements distinguish them from a dialogical perspective with the concepts and meanings of textbooks? In this article we seek to understand the history magazines
in Portugal, identifying their pedagogical purpose, besides of their sense of disseminating historical knowledge and their commercial interests. We aim to raise questions from a panoramic view of the Portuguese editorial projects in circulation nowadays. To do so, we’ll use the Brazilian cases as reference, both because of the theoretical contributions already consolidated around this topic, and the potential cultural dialogs in Portuguese language in the publishing and historiographical production fields. What relationship or distinction can be drawn between these printed materials and school textbooks? This is thus an attempt to analyze the existence of strategies to meet the needs of history teaching, official curricula and the readership ideally
formed by education professionals.

For a Professional and Civically Responsible History: The First Years of the “Nueva Escuela Historica”

2023-05-12T11:29:35+01:00

The “Nueva Escuela Historica” brought together a group of Argentine historians, from the second decade of the 20th century, who, with a wide institutional deployment and important diffusion projects, sought to define precisely the margins of the discipline. The article advances in the exploration of some of the conditions that are established for historical knowledge during the first years of these school, it considers the historiographic assumptions that are being established and articulates them with the pretensions of assigning a leading role to the discipline in the political life of the nation. In this articulation, the question of the nation became protagonist and, together with it, the possibility of recognizing there the deployment of a specific consideration of temporality, which reconfigures the conceptual framework, basis for the understanding of the history. In the light of these rules and conditions, the article focuses in particular on the account of colonial history as a history elaborated in and for a present. It is recognized how those historiographic norms are exercised there and how, in tune with the possibility of thinking from a new time frame, the historian becomes the authorized agent for the design of subjectivity required by the nation.

Fiction, Postmemory and Transgenerational Trauma: Literary Possibilities through the Shoah Paradigm

2022-11-04T01:44:37+00:00

In this article, I place literature as a possibility for the working-through of trauma, taking as object the paradigmatic case of the Shoah, an event that established the need to think about new ways of dealing with the past in historiography. With the inclusion of testimony as a source for historiography, memory invades the historiographical space. Concepts such as post-memory and the notion of a transgenerationality of trauma will be mobilized in order to address the fiction produced by survivors that were children at the time and members of a second and third generation after the Shoah. The text is divided into two major topics, the first dedicated to the so-called 1.5 generation and the second dedicated to the second and third generations.

Legacies of the Portuguese Colonial Empire: Nationalism, Popular Culture and Citizenship

2024-01-22T19:06:18+00:00

Review of Elsa Peralta and Nuno Domingos, eds. Legacies of the Portuguese Colonial Empire: Nationalism, Popular Culture and Citizenship. London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2023, 288 pp.

Mapping Black Europe Monuments, Markers, Memories

2023-07-12T02:52:01+01:00

Review of Natasha A. Kelly e Olive Vassell, eds. Mapping Black Europe: Monuments, Markers, Memories. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2023, 198 pp.

Identity and Otherness: Images and Representations in History Teaching Materials in Portuguese-speaking countries

2024-01-22T18:16:31+00:00

"I Don't Know if I Am Key or Kocker...": (Post)memories, Education and Literacy in Guinea-Bissau. A Conversation with Mário Cabral and Pansau Cabral

2023-10-12T16:05:02+01:00

Although his trajectory is poorly studied, Mário Cabral, a former militant and leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), is one of the central figures of the period of the liberation struggle and post-independence in Guinea-Bissau. The son of a colonial administrator that conceded a great importance to education, Mário Cabral narrates his life and career since his childhood until the high positions he occupied after the independence of his country, going through his studies in Portugal, his clandestine activism and the periods he spent in Conacry and Madina de Boé. This interview with the former Commissioner for the Educatin and Culture of Guinea-Bissau reveals the individual trajectory of a man for whom education must be an integral part of the struggle for formal and concrete independence, but also indicates the importance of post-memory in the reconstitution of the history of the 1970s. Pansau Cabral, the son of Mário, joins the conversation, linking the threads of memories sometimes intact, sometimes damaged by the years. This resulted in a prime historical source about the trajectory of a Guinean man, activist and leader of the PAIGC, whose convictions and actions sought to transform the educative landscape of his country

Robert Rowland: A Testimony

2024-01-22T18:57:31+00:00

Robert Rowland (São Paulo, 1945 - Lisbon, 2023). I will make a short roundup of his partially-known universitary career, followed by the circunstances in which I contacted and worked with him. Rowland's impact in Portuguese scholarship and the influence of his ideas and methods will be examined through this text. It is a personal testimony, obviosuly marked by subjectivity.