Who should remember and what should be remembered: Symbolic disputes over social memory in Quilombo Machadinha / RJ

symbolic disputes over social memory in Quilombo Machadinha / RJ

Abstract

This text aims to reflect on the symbolic disputes around memory taking as an empirical basis a cultural equipment from the Machadinha quilombo, in the city of Quissamã, RJ. At a time when the community was experiencing a period of awareness of its quilombola condition, the aforementioned space, called Memorial, received a set of objects from Angola to compose a scenography. The objects were brought by a team coordinated by the president of the Fundação de Cultura at the time, with the intention of establishing a relationship between the residents of that community and a specific Angolan ethnic group in a region called kissama. This relationship is expressed in a widespread history in the region about the origin of the city's name: Quissamã. In the analytical part of the work, I mobilized theorists from Anthropology and History who deal with the theme of memory, such as Johannes Fabian, Richard Handler, Michael Pollak and Andreas Huyssen.