The Politics and Rhetoric of Commemoration

In recent years there has been much interest in collective memory and commemoration. It is often assumed that when nations celebrate a historic day, they put aside the divisions of the present to recall the past in a spirit of unity. As Billig and Marinho show, this does not apply to the Portuguese parliament''s annual celebration of 25 April 1974, the day when the dictatorship, established by Sal...