Theses defended
Sobrevidas do colonialismo: Uma leitura do contemporâneo a partir de Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida e Tatiana Pequeno
July 22, 2026
Post-Colonialisms and Global Citizenship
António Sousa Ribeiro
e
Miguel Cardina
This dissertation examines the works of the Portuguese writer Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida and the Brazilian poet Tatiana Pequeno. Grounded in the premise that literature can be understood as an archive of images - images that themselves articulate particular imaginaries of the world (Didi-Huberman) -, the study analyzes novels and poems by both authors in order to trace the ways in which colonialism is rearticulated and persists in our time. The contemporary is shaped by multiple pasts and projected futures and continues to reproduce configurations of power that "rearticulate race, gender, class, and other markers of discrimination" forged by colonization (Lage, 2023, p. 26). From this perspective, colonization remains a foundational condition of the contemporary, its originating deed. To provide a demonstration, the dissertation interrogates modern conceptions of time and examines how temporal frameworks forged by modernity continue to shape contemporary
imaginaries. The work is divided into two parts. The first offers a critical analysis of Brazil-Portugal relations through public and official discourses and proposes a theoretical dialogue between Walter Benjamin's thought and postcolonial perspectives, with particular attention to memory and temporality. The second part adopts a more propositional approach, drawing on the works of Almeida and Pequeno to suggest new ways of reading the contemporary and the entanglements between intimate, personal histories and collective historical processes. Across four chapters, Part II of the dissertation analyzes representations of time in both Almeida and Pequeno's work as well as their reflections on space, with emphasis on ill or violated bodies and on the cities inhabited by the authors' characters and poetic selves. Finally, it argues that the notion of haunting constitutes a shared axis in both bodies of work and in Walter Benjamin's, underpinning an ethics of memory central to their writings.
Keywords: Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida; Tatiana Pequeno; memory; Luso-Brazilian colonialism; Walter Benjamin.
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Abstract
imaginaries. The work is divided into two parts. The first offers a critical analysis of Brazil-Portugal relations through public and official discourses and proposes a theoretical dialogue between Walter Benjamin's thought and postcolonial perspectives, with particular attention to memory and temporality. The second part adopts a more propositional approach, drawing on the works of Almeida and Pequeno to suggest new ways of reading the contemporary and the entanglements between intimate, personal histories and collective historical processes. Across four chapters, Part II of the dissertation analyzes representations of time in both Almeida and Pequeno's work as well as their reflections on space, with emphasis on ill or violated bodies and on the cities inhabited by the authors' characters and poetic selves. Finally, it argues that the notion of haunting constitutes a shared axis in both bodies of work and in Walter Benjamin's, underpinning an ethics of memory central to their writings.
Keywords: Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida; Tatiana Pequeno; memory; Luso-Brazilian colonialism; Walter Benjamin.