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Night Stories: Urban Narratives of Migrant Lives in Europe
  • ISSN: 2040-4344
  • E-ISSN: 2040-4352

Abstract

The city of Lisbon has scar tissue, a reminder of pain and trauma that administrations often gloss over as urbanization. The demolition of dozens of neighbourhoods has been documented in cinema, both documentaries and feature-length conventional films. Even more stark is the footage from grassroots archivists, who have accompanied since the beginning the raw despair of displacement, an internal uprooting after a generation or more of Luso-African migrants making place in the Lisbon area, especially in the adjacent municipality of Amadora. Over a decade ago, I followed a few of the displaced former residents of Fontaínhas to Casal da Boba, a social neighbourhood, to inquire and record memories about such scars. In late 2020, I reconnected with these interlocutors and discovered more storytellers who have a curious relationship with the former improvised neighbourhood of Bairro de Santo Filomena. This article is a piece of ethnographic fiction based on those experiences.

Funding
This study was supported by the:
  • Humanities in the European Research Area, NITE project (Award HERA 2.060)
  • Hanse-Wissenschaftkolleg Institute for Advanced Studies, Germany
This article is Open Access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND), which allows users to copy, distribute and transmit the article as long as the author is attributed, the article is not used for commercial purposes, and the work is not modified or adapted in any way. To view a copy of the licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
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2022-04-01
2025-06-18
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): Cape Verde; diaspora; experimental writing; Lisbon; memory; migration
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