Framing Sexual Violence in Portuguese Colonialism: On Some Practices of Contemporary Cultural Representation and Remembrance

Abstract

This essay examines two Portuguese novels about colonialism and its legacies: António Lobo Antunes's Fado Alexandrino (1983) and Aida Gomes's Os Pretos de Pousaflores (The Blacks from Pousaflores) (2011). Fado Alexandrino perpetuates the use of Black women's raped bodies as a plot device to represent colonial violence, while Gomes's narrative empowers racialized victims of sexual abuse and challenges dominant public memories of the Colonial War. A close reading of these novels, contextualized against the background of scholarly debates about the representation of sexual violence, exposes both the perils and potential of cultural works to preserve the memory of rape in armed conflict.