Visual Culture and Cultural Memory in the Portuguese Communities in the United States of America ; Cultura Visual e Memória Cultural nas Comunidades Portuguesas nos Estados Unidos da América

Dissertação de Mestrado em Estudos de Cultura, Literatura e Línguas Modernas apresentada à Faculdade de Letras ; There are already countless migration studies both on Portugal as country of departure and the United States (US) as the country of arrival. From the social sciences to economics, immigrant communities are a matter of interest across many fields of study. With this study, I propose to look at the Portuguese immigrant communities in the US from the perspective of their cultural memory and understand how they build it through visual culture. By looking at three different eras of image technology, photography, documentary and social media, this study’s goal is to understand how the Portuguese communities build their shared cultural memory, how they perpetuate it in time and the role visual culture plays in the process. While for the first waves of emigration photography was the main visual source for the conservation of memory, the kind of representations that it allows is limited when compared to that provided by documentary, for example, or other types of representation resorting to the moving image. With the rise of social media, we reach an era when the triviality of visual content and the concept of instantaneity, as a video can be uploaded and instantly receive millions of views a few seconds later. These developments change the forms of visual representation, and their impact on the surrounding communities, which lead me to draw my attention about the different objects here analyzed. In my analyses, I resorted to Stuart Hall’s theories about diaspora and the transformation of identities, as well as, in field of visual culture, to Nicholas Mirzoeff, W.J.T. Mitchell, Susan Sontag, Marita Sturken & Lisa Cartwright and Roland Barthes to establish the relation between visual culture and everyday practices. As for cultural memory, I relied my analyzes in the theories of Astrid Erll & Ansgar Nünning about symbolism and of Jan Assman on the importance that it has on the human being’s ...