UC Berkeley

“Unresolved Pasts: Constructing a Decolonial Literary Cultural Memory in Contemporary Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese Literature” adopts a comparative approach to confronting gaps in the literary cultural memory of colonialism in my three countries of focus. I use an eclectic range of theoretical tools throughout my analysis, though my toolkit privileges theoretical frameworks from Memory Studies and Postcolonial Studies, including cultural memory, collective memory, and colonial aphasia, to name just a few. My primary focus is on a set of core texts representative of each country, António Lobo Antunes’s 1988 As naus, Igiaba Scego’s 2010 La mia casa è dove sono, Igiaba Scego and Rino Bianchi’s 2014 photo essay Roma negata: Percorsi postcoloniali nella città, and Lucía Asué Mbomío Rubio’s 2019 Hija del camino, though I also engage with Luigi Panella, Marco Consentino, and Domenico Dodaro’s 2017 I fantasmi dell’Impero. As a decolonial act, my dissertation is organized according to three key acts of colonialism through which I read the same set of texts: cartography, topography and monumentality, and navigation.I open Chapter 1, “Cartography: Lixbon, Roma, Móstoles,” with depictions of colonial (and neo-colonial) maps from each of my countries of focus, calling attention to their shared preoccupations in maintaining or building colonial bonds. I then map out the implications of decolonial cartographic practices in As naus, La mia casa è dove sono, and Hija del camino, showing how As naus’ disposal of maps performs a repudiation of colonial cartographic claiming, whereas La mia casa è dove sono models a reparative cartography which democratizes mapping. Finally, I consider how Sandra, the protagonist in Hija del camino, engages in personal identity mapping via experiencing racial difference in various situations abroad. My textual analysis is contextualized within country-specific mnemonic paradigms. I close the chapter with a visual analysis of the book covers of Hija del camino and Roma negata: Percorsi postcoloniali nella città. I begin Chapter 2, “Topography and Monumentality: la Legión, o Apóstolo das Índias, la stele di Axum” by detailing Spain’s recent mnemonic history (el pacto del olvido to the 1 2000 Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica and its aftermath); I then take as a case study two polemic statues in Madrid—that of dictator Francisco Franco’s last statue and a recent one commemorating the controversial Legión Epañola, to show the ebb and flow of mnemopolitics in an urban setting. I then move to As naus’ textual construction of a boarding house, symbol of Portugal’s obscured era of the retornados, which houses the author’s insistence on giving space to the shameful aspects of national history which must be confronted. I argue that the boarding house’s textual topography highlights the difficulty in erecting such a structure extratextually, with the novel giving space otherwise unavailable or unamenable to such a monument. Finally, I trace Rome’s Piazza di Porta Capena from La mia casa è dove sono to Roma negata: Percorsi postcoloniali nella città, centering the mnemopolitics involved in replacing the piazza’s one-time stele of Axum with a more recent monument commemorating 9/11. I echo Scego’s concern about the evacuation of the reminder of Italian colonialism housed in the stele, though suggest that there are better places in Rome to house a monument dedicated to Italy’s colonial involvement. As with my other chapters, in Chapter 3, “Navigation: Turtles, Shoes, Strides, Myths,” I examine the etymological root of the chapter’s guiding theme, imbuing the Latin roots with a recontextualization serving my dissertation’s decolonial approach. This chapter can be divided into two halves: in the first, I analyze the limits and affordances of walking as a trope for the exploration of identity, contrasting Roma negata: Percorsi postcoloniali nella città and Hija del camino. In the second half I employ a different set of navigational word-tools, such as ‘guiding’ and ‘(mis)directing’ to examine I fantasmi dell’Impero’s textual exoneration of Italian war crimes. I include images of Rodolfo Graziani’s mausoleum, an important site in Italy’s contemporary memory politics, as an intertextual link between this text and Roma negata.