Editorial: revolution and memories

Journal of Social Science Education ©JSSE 2015 Volume 14, Number 2, Summer 2015 DOI 10.2390/jsse-v14-i2-1451 2 Manuel Loff is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Porto, and a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History (FCSH-UNL), Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, Via Panorâmica, s/n, Porto 4150-755, Portugal Email: [email protected] Isabel Menezes is Professor in the Department of Education at the University of Porto, and a researcher at the Centre of Educational Research and Intervention, Porto, Portugal. Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciências da Educação da Universidade do Porto. Rua Alfredo Allen. Porto, 4200135, Portugal Email: [email protected] Manuel Loff, Isabel Menezes Editorial: Revolution and Memories In the 1970s, soon after the 1968 whirlwind that swept most of the planet, Southern Europe went through a wave of democratisation, the first since the anti-Nazi Liberation period at the end of WWII. Authoritarian regimes fell in Portugal (1974), Greece (1974) and Spain (1976-78), although democracy was built in each of these countries following very different procedures. In Portugal, a democratic military coup opened the gates to an unstoppable political and social revolution, while in Spain and Greece – as it would happen almost ever since in Latin America and Central-Eastern Europe – democratisation was essentially gradual, and involved a complex and often contradictory negotiation held by the military and political elites of these regimes and some of the opposition forces in order to build up a postauthoritarian regime. Despite the different nature of these democratisation processes, every post-authoritarian society faces somehow similar problems when it comes to deal with both collective and/or individual memories of the past. Many European citizens “have lived through (…) oppression, and name it so, others feel its legacy as a part of their own personal memory, and others still, having lived it or not, do not recall their experience or the memory they have inherited as oppressive” (Loff, 2010, p. 55). These very diverse memories, all of which are socially re-constructed every time they come out into the public sphere, co-exist, even if its conflicting nature is many times denied and seldom assumed as a potential basis for citizenship education (Ferreira et al., 2013). This issue celebrates the 40 th anniversary of the Portuguese Carnation Revolution but expands beyond the Portuguese case as it welcomes papers dealing with the relationship between memory, oppression, democratisation and political change in Latin America. It similarly includes papers from a variety of disciplines (e.g. Education, Memory Studies, Political Psychology, Literature and Cultural Geography), discussing and contrasting memorial discourses of different generations and social and political groups, both on the “dark times” they have lived through, and on the “strong memories” – as opposed to “weak” ones, as defined by Traverso (2005, p. 54) – resulting from intense and enthusiastic moments in which they felt they were taking their lives into their hands. Interestingly enough, almost half of the papers focus on women and their specific role in historical processes of resistance and change until recently too much perceived on a male perspective. The volume starts with a walk through the revolution where Ana Isabel Queiroz and Daniel Alves combine literature and geography to propose an educational historical excursion, Walking through the Revolution: a spatial reading of literary echoes. The authors suggest a trail “made up by nine places of remembrance” that are combined with “literary works refer[ing] to events that happened between the eve of April 25 and May 1, 1974” including “the most iconic military actions and popular demonstrations that occurred in Lisbon and the surroundings”. In a volume that celebrates the 1974 Revolution, this interesting combination between literature and space demonstrates how cities can become places to re-experience historical memories (like true lieux de mémoire, as Pierre Nora (1989) classically calls them) and how informal education experiences can foster critical citizenship. The research by Sandi Michele de Oliveira, Discourses of inclusion and exclusion in the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Portuguese Revolution, demonstrates how a critical reading of commemoration discourses is essential, and reveals the absence in the power narratives of the revolution of “the themes and participants by groups who were most directly involved in the Revolution”. She refers to “actors” as “the 'Captains of Abril'”, i.e. the young captains who prepared the 1974 revolution, “the retornados” i.e. the Portuguese equivalent to the French pieds-noirs, former colonists who chose to return to Portugal after the decolonisation, and the “retornados-emigrantes”, i.e. those colonists who left the newly independent African countries but chose to migrate to another country, namely SouthAfrica or Brazil. In the author’s perspective counter memories and discordant voices should be explicitly acknowledged in education not only because they “provide immediacy, poignancy and authenticity”, but also because they allow for a more complex and deep understanding of the significance of the historical events, both the ones that we want to celebrate, and the ones we must not forget. The following paper, by Ximena Faúndez and Ximena Goecke, deals exactly with the transgenerational risks of silencing and forgetfulness. In Psychosocial Trauma Transmission and Appropriation in Grandchildren of Former Political Prisoners of the Civic – Military Dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990), by analysing “the narratives of the grandchildren of victims of the CivicMilitary Dictatorship in Chile” who reveal how psychosocial trauma is transmitted and internalized in families Journal of Social Science Education ©JSSE 2015 Volume 14, Number 2, Spring 2015 ISSN 1618–5293 3 of former political prisoners. This trauma appears to be amplified by the lack of an open political and social discussion that also impacts on how families and individuals silence and avoid the traumatic events – leading the authors to consider that “transition to democracy in Chile has been an incomplete process” made evident in “the lack of truth and justice regarding human rights issues”. This absence leaves on individual actors, such as teachers, the responsibility of addressing human rights and citizenship education but in a societal context that clearly does not favor a narrative that includes “the political identities, specific experiences and points of view of those victims”. Cristina Nogueira also looks at the experience of resistance to oppression, but considering Knowledge and the experience of women living underground during the Portuguese dictatorship. Based on a series of interviews with women, militants of the Portuguese Communist party, living in hiding (1940-1974), as well as the analysis of published autobiographical narratives and other documents, Cristina explores the different roles women had to play in underground, revealing how gender inequalities were expressed and lived. The educational effects of these experiences relate not only to literacy and practical knowledge but also to deep identity transformations that generated specific subjectivities. Again, the relevance of actor-centred perspectives in memory studies and citizenship education appears as an essential part of remembering and celebrating historical events. In Social and psycho political impacts in the social construction of political memory of the Brazilian military dictatorship, Soraia Ansara makes an analysis of the political memory of community and union leaderships, and also detects the tendency for forgetfulness and to avoid confrontations with the past. In this case, she reveals the role of “several ‘underground memories’" (Pollak, 1989), built by the working classes, which contradict the versions disseminated by the official memory and enhance the social movements’ capacity for action as a strategy of resistance and political struggle of the movements today”. Sónia Dantas-Ferreira also considers memories of the Portuguese revolution by interviewing 11 women who were married to servicemen during the Colonial War. In Women’s experiences: memories of Portuguese Revolution she explores their visions on work, family, education, politics and social life, and on the changes brought about by the Revolution, but also confronts their expectations and dreams with the current situation – thus also revealing how the high hopes generated by the revolution were only partially confirmed. As the author states, “the meaning of the past is always a meaning shaped and dialectically re-shaped by this present on behalf of a possible Future. And, in this sense, these women’s memories draw a present resulting from a postponed Future in a past in which the promises to come shine brighter than the light they throw to Now”. Finally, the last paper considers the experience of The Portuguese literacy campaigns after the Carnation Revolution (1974-1977) that “aimed to address the problem of extremely low levels of education and high levels of adult illiteracy”. Isabel Pereira Gomes, José Pedro Amorim, José Alberto Correia and Isabel Menezes expose some of the tensions in the uses of Paulo Freire’s theory and methods and explore the lived experiences of literacy campaigns through the eyes of two young women, at that time, who participated in these initiatives. Again, gender inequalities and poverty emerge as particularly atrocious during the dictatorship and, not surprisingly, the impact of these literacy campaigns for older women is emphasised. But the young literacy mediators, in line with Freire’s vision, still refer to this as a life-changing event that generated “high levels of hope and political mobilization”. On the whole, most of the papers we have gathered here deal with narratives which, especially when they deliberately try to express a collective identity, tend to consolidate, as well as represent, communities of memory (Booth, 2006). Because the past is, in fact, always an artifact of the present (Lowenthal, 1985). The role of remembrance is, as Hannah Arendt would put it, to “save human deeds from the futility that comes from oblivion” (1961, p. 42). And these narratives of the past are an essential part of how we define ourselves as citizens (Haste, 2004) and, whether acknowledged or not, they play a central role in the on-going debate regarding the nature and quality of democracies today. References Arendt, Hannah (1961). Between Past and Future. Six Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Viking Press. Booth, W. James (2006). Communities of Memory: On Witness, Identity, and Justice. New York: Cornell University Press. Ferreira, P., Caetano, A., Rodrigues, M., Lopes, C. C., Pais, Sofia, Araújo, H. C. & Menezes, I. (2013). Visions of the authoritarian past in citizenship education policies and practices in Spain and Portugal. In Reinhold Hedtke & Tatjana Zimenkova (Eds.), Education for civic and political participation: A critical approach (pp. 207-224). London: Routledge. Haste, H. (2004). Constructing the citizen. Political Psychology, 25 (3), 413-439. Loff, Manuel (2010). Coming to terms with the dictatorial past in Portugal after 1974: Silence, remembrance and ambiguity. In S. Troebst & S. Baumgartl (Eds.), Postdiktatorische Geschichtskulturen im Süden und Osten Europas. Bestandsaufnahme und Forschungsperspektiven (pp. 55-121). Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Lowenthal, David (1985). The past is a foreign country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nora, P. (1989). Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire. Representations, 26, 7-24. Traverso, Enzo (2005). Le passé, modes d'emploi – histoire, mémoire, politique. Paris: La Fabrique.