Paper short abstract:

The purpose of this communication is to discuss the construction of home in exilic contexts, namely its relation with the production and preservation of exilic transnational archives taking as a starting point an investigation about the production of archives in exile during the Estado Novo regime.

Paper long abstract:

The purpose of this communication is to discuss the construction of home in exilic contexts, namely its relation with the production and preservation of exilic transnational archives - as opposed to national archives (Creet, 2011) and personal archives - taking as a starting point an on-going investigation about the production of archives in exile, namely in Europe (France, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark) during the Estado Novo regime, particularly the period of the Portuguese Colonial War (1961-1974).

In this context we believe that through the example of these archives we can discuss the home left behind, the new home in exile context, the home on the road - on the return to Portugal in 1974 with the end of the dictatorship - as well as the post-exile home, whether in Portugal or in other geographical contexts.

We intend to explore the act of archiving and the archive as an act of distribution of the self (Gell 1998), included in mobility processes. As a cultural artefact, the archive cross borders, being himself a mirror of these processes of mobility allowing, on the one hand, to discuss feelings of belonging, rooting and uprooting, and secondly, to articulate different concepts of home or place of shelter both in individual cases as on collective ones when, for example, political projects within transnational networks are at stake.