Center of Portuguese Studies Speaker Professor Margarida Rendeiro
Claire T Carney Library_Ferreira-Mendes Archives
Antonio Ladeira
806 642-3320
aladeira@umassd.edu
What do we inherit from empire? And what survives when colonial histories are transmitted across generations, remain inscribed in places, and are reworked through relationships?
This talk brings into dialogue two bodies of literary and cultural inquiry that illuminate different dimensions of colonial afterlives. The first concerns contemporary Portuguese literature by Afro-descendant women, where memory, postmemory, historical erasure, and reparative practices reveal how colonial legacies are transmitted across generations. What is inherited extends beyond remembered events: silences, affects, attachments, displacements, and contested forms of belonging are reinterpreted by those who inherit histories they did not directly experience. This work led me to ask how colonial histories become inheritance—and to consider the places in which histories of survival, resistance, and unequal relations unfolded. Memory is carried not only by people and texts, but also by places.
Tarrafal and the plantation spaces of São Tomé and Príncipe offer distinct sites through which material traces, absences, silences, and ghosts make imperial afterlives perceptible in the present. Bringing these perspectives together, I ask: what survives between people? Under what conditions might inherited histories, shared vulnerability, care, and collective survival become forms of solidarity? The question, then, is not only what we inherit, but what futures we can build together. I approach solidarity not as a legacy of empire, but as an open question about the relations that survive or emerge from its afterlives.
Biographical Blurb
Margarida Rendeiro is a tenured researcher at the Centre for the Humanities (CHAM), NOVA FCSH, Lisbon, where she coordinates the Research Group on Transcultural, Literary, and Postcolonial Studies. She holds a PhD in Portuguese Studies from King’s College London. Her research focuses on Afro-Luso-Brazilian literary and cultural production, cultural resistance, women’s writing, and memory. She is co-editor of Writing as Cultural Resistance (V&R/Brill, 2026) and Challenging Memories and Rebuilding Identities (Routledge, 2019). She was Principal Investigator of the FCT-funded project Women’s Literature: Memories, Peripheries, and Resistance in the Luso-Afro-Brazilian Atlantic and currently contributes to international research projects on women in literature and the visual arts and on contemporary Portuguese-language historical fiction. During the Fall 2026 semester, she is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University.
Free and Open to the Public
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