Gerard Llorens-DeCesaris | Fung Public Seminar Series: Notes on Colonial Memory: How 'Havaneres' Remade Catalonia’s Imperial Pasts

2025-26 Fung Global Fellow, Gerard Llorens-DeCesaris, will present his talk entitled, "Notes on Colonial Memory: How 'Havaneres' Remade Catalonia’s Imperial Pasts." How do societies remember difficult pasts and what do they choose not to remember? This talk explores the politics of colonial memory in Catalonia, showing how music, festivals, and heritage practices have transformed the region’s entanglements with empire into familiar stories of identity and belonging. Focusing on the cultural life of the havanera, a genre with Caribbean origins now woven into Catalonia’s coastal tradition, the talk asks how some histories become celebrated while others fade into silence. Moving from local festivals and posters to televised rituals, it highlights the growing friction between Catalan and Spanish memory regimes, where shared imperial histories are reworked into competing stories of pride, loss, and innocence, often sidestepping the violence that shaped them. More broadly, the talk invites audiences to rethink how nations remake the past through sound, landscape, and emotion, and what these practices reveal about the ways contemporary Europe continues to grapple with the legacies of empire.

Fung Global Fellows Program, PIIRS | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Program in Contemporary European Politics and Society

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