Portuguese Journal of Social Science - Volume 14, Issue 3, 2015

This article proposes a critical analysis of recent interpretations made to the history of architecture and urban planning in the Portuguese colonial context in the twentieth century, particularly in the former African territories. More generally, it intends to explore how the internal history produced by specific fields of activity, such as architecture or urbanism, can reinforce the logic of a national and nationalized history. This effect is due partly to the fact that the legitimacy of these fields is largely dependent on the national identification in the context of activities that are internationalized. I will argue that the specific field of activity, while creating this internal discourse, can directly or indirectly produce representations of the nation, its history and its people on a larger scale, penetrating popular culture and influencing a shared common sense. In the case in question, the internal discourse on architectural and urbanistic works, on authors and styles, eventually reinforces an idealized and idyllic image of Portuguese colonialism.

The concept of lusotropicalism inspired various stereotypes about Portugal and the Portuguese, namely the idea they were more adaptable to the tropics because of their alleged plasticity – materialized in an adaptation to different climates, mobility and the ability to miscegenate – and more successful colonizers than the rest of the Europeans. The maintenance and reproduction of lusotropicalism was supported by a set of national fantasies, which precluded the political disagreements that traversed colonial society. Those fantasies proliferated through the cultural realm, particularly in mass culture events that offered a fertile ground for interpreting and understanding the dissemination of lusotropicalism as an ‘imagined political community’. In this article I intend to forge new connections between the everyday politics of nationalism and the cultural politics of mass culture, seeking new forms to identify the ubiquity of nationalist discourses.

Post-1974 literature and cinema have contributed to a reflection about the Colonial War and, more broadly, about Portuguese colonialism. Novels like António Lobo Antunes’s South of Nowhere, Lídia Jorge’s The Murmuring Coast, Isabela Figueiredo’s Notebook of Colonial Memories, and Dulce Maria Cardoso’s The Return, as well as films such as João Botelho’s A Portuguese Goodbye, Teresa Villaverde’s Coming of Age, António Pedro Vasconcelos’s The Imortals, and Manoel de Oliveira’s, Non, or the Vain Glory of Command, to name but a few, deal with the country’s long colonial past, try to come to terms with the heritage of colonial violence and reflect upon Portugal’s postcolonial identity. In this paper, I argue that this literary and cinematic production mirrors what I have identified as the four modes of being post-colonial in contemporary Portuguese culture: (1) Nostalgia with bad conscience; (2) Trauma; (3) Melancholia; (4) Trace.

This article analyses the role of the sea in the early 1980s songs of singer-songwriter Fausto and pop band Heróis do Mar. Despite their formal and political differences, both use the sea as an insistent trope to discuss Portugal and its history. The sea thus becomes an important element in post-revolutionary Portuguese political cultures, appropriated by opposing political ideologies and cultural forms. And yet a close analysis of the compositions in Por Este Rio Acima/Up the River (released by Fausto in 1982), Heróis do Mar/Heroes of the Sea and Mãe/Mother (released by Heróis do Mar in 1981 and 1983, respectively) suggests that those ideological oppositions determine the ways in which the past is addressed by different musical genres. In this sense, the sea can be seen as a flexible object in which the tensions between the left and right – particularly in relation to the memory of Imperial past in post-colonial Portugal – are negotiated through the formal aspects, both musical and literary, of songs. More specifically, the contrasting ways in which Heróis do Mar and Fausto address the history of Portuguese Empire will have a dramatic impact in the rhythm of their songs and the syntax of their lyrics. It can thus be said that the politics of both pop band and singer-songwriter can be more decisively grasped at the level of form than content.

By examining the career of a Portuguese essayist and historian, this article seeks to examine the relations between culture, nationalism and globalization during the second half of the twentieth century. The article follows the career of António José Saraiva from the 1940s to the 1990s, describing his transformation from expressing a universalist and progressive idea of culture to a nationalist and romantic one, and relating it to the transformations of communist internationalism and to the developments of capitalism and globalization. Considering the ruptures, but also the continuities within Saraiva’s thought, it is argued that his commitment to the problem of alienation plays a key role in this transformation While contributing to the history of one of the most read Portuguese intellectuals of the twentieth century, this article stresses the need for historians and social scientists to move beyond – at least partially – some binary oppositions that often command our approach to culture: namely the conflict between culture and economy on the one hand, and the national and the global, on the other.

This article introduces a new paradigm for scholars interested in liberation movements’ political development and strategies for legitimation. Specifically, the article argues for the historicity of revolutionary pragmatism as a lens to study liberation movements. The decisions, discourses and, most importantly, actions of the leaders of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO – Mozambique Liberation Front) during the 1960s reflected a series of evolving strategies that were necessary to achieve legitimacy for the liberation movement during the anti-colonial war against Portugal. As an attribute of its early political development, legitimacy was an essential aspect of FRELIMO’s status as a liberation front because it was the foundation upon which to establish a viable authority that appealed to both Mozambicans and international observers. FRELIMO’s leaders actively sought to establish and maintain the loyalty of many ordinary Mozambicans who either joined the liberation front or, at the very least, sympathized with the movement’s efforts to fight the Portuguese and liberate Mozambique. The initial interactions between FRELIMO cadres and Mozambicans from 1962 to 1968 necessitated organizational adaptability to contend with the unpredictable contingencies of war. As a hallmark of the liberation movement’s revolutionary pragmatism, then, FRELIMO leaders held a foundational First Congress that established a framework of ideological and ‘governing’ strategies in order to achieve the desired ends of independence.

Between 1961 and 1974, Portugal’s colonial empire in Africa disintegrated. As African liberation movements in Angola waged a protracted war for independence, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled to Congo. This article examines humanitarian assistance in Africa during decolonization to challenge the myth that humanitarian assistance has ever been impartial, neutral or independent. It compares the ways in which one organization, the American Committee on Africa (ACOA), and the US government assisted Angolan refugees in Congo. It asks: how can we understand the relationship between humanitarian aid and political positioning in a Cold War context? This article argues that the particular interests of humanitarian organizations and states determined the types of aid both provided. Cold War tensions prompted the US government to provide educational assistance as part of its humanitarian response to Angolan refugees in Congo, but the same crisis forced a nascent organization such as ACOA to open dialogue among its members in order to define its position on the relationship between African liberation politics and humanitarian intervention.

The relationship between social revolutions and women’s emancipation remains an unresolved controversy in historical scholarship. The ways in which various constituencies of a revolutionary movement view and relate to women’s emancipation organizations raise very uncomfortable questions. Under European colonialism, no sizeable African women’s movement devoted to women’s liberation existed in any African territory. In anti-colonial movements, the absence of viable women’s organizations working for women’s liberation presented several challenges to the African feminist activists and the male-led national liberation movements. It was only after the Second World War that the demands of women across the continent converged with those of national liberation movements as women proved to be a very reliable asset. The Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC – African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) offers a strikingly unusual example of an African national liberation movement stressing the need for equality between men and women in the context of the revolution, ensuring that women occupied leadership positions, and the União Democrática das Mulheres da Guiné e Cabo Verde (UDEMU – Democratic Union of Women of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde) in 1961. Many party members did not support this radical approach, and internal conflict among the men caused UDEMU to disband in 1966. By examining the specific challenges the women’s emancipation agenda posed to the revolutionary leadership in Guinea-Bissau, this article reveals the sociocultural and gender biases among even the most advanced male leaders. This bias, I argue, is the primary reason this unique women’s emancipation agenda remained unfulfilled. Further, such bias influenced disagreement among the women themselves and so hindered them from articulating and applying a coherent programme. Only by delving into these biases and divisions can historians and activists begin to understand both the essential connections between national liberation and women’s liberation, and the reasons for the failure to put into practice these connections.