1 ECAS 4 – 4 th European Conference on African Studies Panel 043. Contested truths in Africa: facing power, transitional justice, and memory politics SPACES OF MEMORY: THE CONSTRUCTION OF COLONIAL AND POST-COLONIAL SPACES IN THE MEMORIES OF FORMER PORTUGUESE COLONIZERS Author: Mário Artur Machaqueiro Affiliation: CRIA (Centre for Research in Anthropology), Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, FCSH, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (New University of Lisbon) Email addresses: mmachaqueiro@netcabo.pt; maarma@fcsh.unl.pt The question of the intricate relationship between memory and history has become even more problematic under the post-colonial condition. The role of memory in the shaping of history – understood as a strategic reading of the past – is now a deeply contested one, for we are confronted with plural, conflictive and politicized narratives which erupted from the identities that co-existed in the tensional field of colonial power relations. My paper addresses a segment of this new landscape, focusing on the memories constructed by former Portuguese colonizers who occupied different positions in the structure of colonial power. It is my contention that the memories and narratives produced by those who integrated the formerly dominant side, defeated in the process of the colonial wars, must be conceived as part and parcel of post-coloniality. This must be the case if we conceive the post-colonial as a historical frame whose relation with its intercalated times – including the colonial past – is a complex intertwining of continuities and discontinuities, consonances and dissonances, which are by themselves at the root of a new regime of signification. Since the latter is implied in the displacement and reconfiguration of what is represented as ‘Portuguese space’, there is no strong rationale to exclude from post-coloniality the memories and narratives of those who belonged to ‘the other side’, the one that was overthrown in the course of the historical process. By thinking the present through a reconstruction of the colonial past, those discourses are a different way of articulating the prefix of post-colonialism, even