Postcolonial Memories of Media reception and construction of collective belongings: the case of Portuguese Muslim Women of Indian and Mozambican origins: ebook

This paper discusses the Lusophone Postcolonial gendered identities of Portuguese Muslim mature women of Indian and Mozambican origins through an analysis of their memories of media reception/ media practice (Couldry, 2004) in Mozambique during colonial times. It results from a wider ethnographic PhD research, focused on the role of sensory objects in the reproduction of collective memories of belonging among Portuguese Muslims of Indian and Mozambican origins.
The data explored here suggest that memories of ‘media practices’ - namely of radio, music and film – are often intertwined with everyday life family memories, while emerging together with a history of a country under transformation. These remembrances of media practices constitute also temporal referents in these women’s life stories, as they signal significant acts of identity construction and belonging-ness that comprise two simultaneous processes: one of mimicry and desire for the other (Bhabha, 1994); the other of imagination of collective worlds and communities of belonging (Anderson, 1983-2006; Appadurai, 1998). Both are facilitated by the continuous use and appropriation of these various media within wider contexts of practice and living that articulate general ideas of Portuguese-ness, European-ness/ Western-ness, and of Indian-ness from colonial to postcolonial Mozambique.
While these identity processes encapsulate possibilities of gender agency, they also carry a certain degree of reproduction of past gender roles that lack the possibility of change. This is firstly because to a certain extent ‘habit memories’ (Connerton, 1989) that have defined the continuous and routinized usage of some of these media both in domestic and public spaces have contributed to imprint these collective forms of belonging-ness in these women’s bodies and positionalities. Secondly, this is also because perceived differences in ethnicity, class and race, as well as, affective memories of lived experience of locality (Brah, 1996) have shown to determine the possibilities of re-appropriation and/or reproduction of both imagined and lived memories of belonging in Postcoloniality.