Sorry not sorry : a critical discourse analysis of European cognitions of colonial injustices between 2020 and 2022

• Ano de defesa: 2024
• Autor(a) principal: Gonçalves, Bruna Alves
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Biblioteca Digitais de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Palavras-chave em Português: Cultural memory; Justiça social; Memória cultural; Pós-colonialismo; Post-colonialism; Semiótica; Semiotics; Social justice
• Link de acesso: https://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/2/2139/tde-06062024-112602/

Collective memories shape social behaviours, values, and principles. The stories we tell ourselves about the past attribute a sense of naturality and inevitability to how we interact with one another and organise ourselves; they justify why things are the way they are. As such, they are dialectically related to power structures, being constituted by, as well as constituting them. This raises a critical question: how do dominant groups leverage remembrance to reconcile with the violence upon which their power was built? Understanding this is key to deciphering the intentions behind coloniser States increasingly popular proposals of reckoning with colonial injustices. The movement, emergent in the late 20th century, was especially fuelled by the discussions provoked by the 2020 Black Lives Matter. In the two years that followed, seven occasions were marked by verbal acknowledgments of colonisation, a third of all such commemorations. This research employs critical discourse analysis to delve into the political dimensions of these texts. It primarily seeks to determine whether the commemorations challenged or reinforced colonial power structures, and how.