Friday 28 January 2011

Portugal’s Colonial Complex ...

... From Colonial Lusotropicalism to Postcolonial Lusophony


[Miguel Vale de Almeida]


Lusotropicalism was the invention of a Brazilian author, Gilberto Freyre. Although he is widely known as the author of Casa Grande e Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves, in the English translation), he did not explicitly use the concept in that major work of his, written in the 1930s. The underlying notions – that the Portuguese, due to historical and cultural reasons had an inclination towards adaptation and miscegenation – were there, but the term was not branded until the 1950s in books that he wrote on the aftermath of his journeys throughout the Portuguese colonial empire.

It is therefore significant to note that we are dealing with a theory that has a complex colonial and postcolonial history: a Brazilian author, involved in the intellectual struggles about the representations of the national identity of his country (independent since the 19th century) proposes an historical interpretation of Brazil’s formation in which the Portuguese play a major role; he is then invited to visit the Portuguese colonies in Africa and India and, by means of comparison and analogy between Brazil and Africa, he develops the notion of Lusotropicalism as a special kind of inclination or capacity for miscegenation that the Portuguese were supposed to have; this interpretation is then used by the Portuguese colonial regime to legitimize its claims in Africa against growing anticolonial pressure as of the late 1950s and until the demise of the colonial and dictatorial regime in the early 1970s.

[...]

Portugal had no economic, military or demographic power – after the demise of the first and second empires, respectively in India and the East in the 16th and 17th centuries, and in Brazil in the 17th and 18th centuries – to effectively occupy its historical territories in Africa. It was not until Salazar’s regime that an actual colonial enterprise in Africa was set up (that is, a colonial regime, with proper institutions and knowledge systems). Portugal lived under a dictatorship from 1926 to 1974 and throughout this period the African colonies were to occupy a major and central role not only in the economy but also in the official representations of national identity. How was this done?

[...]

That is probably why the effective occupation of the African colonies, which took place as of the 1940s and 1950s was done on the basis of different “Constitutions” – i.e., sets of rules for politically administering the populations, based on specific representations of difference and sameness. One the one hand, some territories were classified as not quite colonies. Cape Verde and India were seen as products of an on-going miscegenation, for different reasons. Cape Verde was the outcome of a mix between Portuguese colonials and slaves from the African mainland imported to a deserted archipelago. And India was seen as a civilization in its own right, a civilization that had met another, that of European Christianity.

Cape Verdean culture was classified as regional, not as colonial, and its population – its elites – had special rights, one of which was their recruitment as colonial middlemen in the African mainland. Other colonies, like Angola and Mozambique, were clearly seen as African and there a different “constitution” was established. With an economy based on forced labor, people were divided into three legal categories: citizens, i.e. the Portuguese; indigenous or native; and “assimilated”. The assimilated were indigenous people who had to undergo a probation period and exams in order to prove that they were Christian, that they dressed in European fashion, that they were monogamous, and that they spoke Portuguese (bear this in mind). They never amounted to more than 1% of the colonial population.

[...]

It was at that juncture that, in the 1950s, Freyre was invited by the Minister of the Overseas to visit and write on the colonies. His ideas were already being received and discussed in the stifling intellectual circles of Lisbon. They fitted nicely with the vague humanistic perspectives of the traditional Left, but they fit even more nicely with the regime’s growing strategy toward presenting the Portuguese empire as a multiracial and multi-continental nation.

[...]

Both the Portuguese state and the population had their representations challenged by the flux of migrants that started in the late 1980s and is still going on. These were initially (and still are) from ex-colonies in Africa and then from Brazil and Eastern European countries. The immigration of Africans faced the Portuguese with their own representations of colonial miscegenation, tolerance and exceptionalism.

This resulted in a cognitive tension that social scientists have identified in studies on blatant and covert racism: statements on the non-racist character of Portuguese society are hegemonic and are usually justified with the example of Portuguese expansion and colonialism as exceptionally tolerant, in what could be labeled as a form of popular lusotropicalism (and an evidence of how hegemonic that discourse became); but they are confronted with the social exclusion of immigrants, their geographical ascription to the worse neighborhoods, the exploitation of their labor and the difficulties they face when applying for citizenship or to access rights of all sorts.

[...]

This I call postlusotropicalism, playing with the similarity with the notion of post
colonialism, as the study of colonial continuations in the present. That is also why one cannot just denounce the colonial in the postcolonial. One should also acknowledge that, for better or worse, the colonial experience did create a common world of reference for many people. What we should do is work on this basic statement and set out to identify the intricate relations between power and emancipation, violence and pleasure in which such a forced commonality became a lived commonality.

It is as if we were all still caught in Freyre’s erotically charged vignette (because terrifying and pleasurable) describing sexual relations between a Portuguese male slave owner and his female black slave in 16th century Northeastern Brazil. This image still haunts us today, with its contradictions of power and intimacy, connecting the ambiguities of Lusotropicalism with those of Lusophony. That is why I have used the expression “Complex” in the title: both in the sense of “intricate” or “complicated”, and in the psychoanalytical sense.


[Extracts from here]


Related posts:


"Complexo de Colonizado"

Parafraseando

Feminismo Negro Brasileiro

Lusofonia e Antropologia

Lusofonia: Cultura ou Ideologia?

Conferencia Internacional sobre Cultura Tchokwe'


... From Colonial Lusotropicalism to Postcolonial Lusophony


[
Miguel Vale de Almeida]


Lusotropicalism was the invention of a Brazilian author, Gilberto Freyre. Although he is widely known as the author of Casa Grande e Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves, in the English translation), he did not explicitly use the concept in that major work of his, written in the 1930s. The underlying notions – that the Portuguese, due to historical and cultural reasons had an inclination towards adaptation and miscegenation – were there, but the term was not branded until the 1950s in books that he wrote on the aftermath of his journeys throughout the Portuguese colonial empire.

It is therefore significant to note that we are dealing with a theory that has a complex colonial and postcolonial history: a Brazilian author, involved in the intellectual struggles about the representations of the national identity of his country (independent since the 19th century) proposes an historical interpretation of Brazil’s formation in which the Portuguese play a major role; he is then invited to visit the Portuguese colonies in Africa and India and, by means of comparison and analogy between Brazil and Africa, he develops the notion of Lusotropicalism as a special kind of inclination or capacity for miscegenation that the Portuguese were supposed to have; this interpretation is then used by the Portuguese colonial regime to legitimize its claims in Africa against growing anticolonial pressure as of the late 1950s and until the demise of the colonial and dictatorial regime in the early 1970s.

[...]

Portugal had no economic, military or demographic power – after the demise of the first and second empires, respectively in India and the East in the 16th and 17th centuries, and in Brazil in the 17th and 18th centuries – to effectively occupy its historical territories in Africa. It was not until Salazar’s regime that an actual colonial enterprise in Africa was set up (that is, a colonial regime, with proper institutions and knowledge systems). Portugal lived under a dictatorship from 1926 to 1974 and throughout this period the African colonies were to occupy a major and central role not only in the economy but also in the official representations of national identity. How was this done?

[...]

That is probably why the effective occupation of the African colonies, which took place as of the 1940s and 1950s was done on the basis of different “Constitutions” – i.e., sets of rules for politically administering the populations, based on specific representations of difference and sameness. One the one hand, some territories were classified as not quite colonies. Cape Verde and India were seen as products of an on-going miscegenation, for different reasons. Cape Verde was the outcome of a mix between Portuguese colonials and slaves from the African mainland imported to a deserted archipelago. And India was seen as a civilization in its own right, a civilization that had met another, that of European Christianity.

Cape Verdean culture was classified as regional, not as colonial, and its population – its elites – had special rights, one of which was their recruitment as colonial middlemen in the African mainland. Other colonies, like Angola and Mozambique, were clearly seen as African and there a different “constitution” was established. With an economy based on forced labor, people were divided into three legal categories: citizens, i.e. the Portuguese; indigenous or native; and “assimilated”. The assimilated were indigenous people who had to undergo a probation period and exams in order to prove that they were Christian, that they dressed in European fashion, that they were monogamous, and that they spoke Portuguese (bear this in mind). They never amounted to more than 1% of the colonial population.

[...]

It was at that juncture that, in the 1950s, Freyre was invited by the Minister of the Overseas to visit and write on the colonies. His ideas were already being received and discussed in the stifling intellectual circles of Lisbon. They fitted nicely with the vague humanistic perspectives of the traditional Left, but they fit even more nicely with the regime’s growing strategy toward presenting the Portuguese empire as a multiracial and multi-continental nation.

[...]

Both the Portuguese state and the population had their representations challenged by the flux of migrants that started in the late 1980s and is still going on. These were initially (and still are) from ex-colonies in Africa and then from Brazil and Eastern European countries. The immigration of Africans faced the Portuguese with their own representations of colonial miscegenation, tolerance and exceptionalism.

This resulted in a cognitive tension that social scientists have identified in studies on blatant and covert racism: statements on the non-racist character of Portuguese society are hegemonic and are usually justified with the example of Portuguese expansion and colonialism as exceptionally tolerant, in what could be labeled as a form of popular lusotropicalism (and an evidence of how hegemonic that discourse became); but they are confronted with the social exclusion of immigrants, their geographical ascription to the worse neighborhoods, the exploitation of their labor and the difficulties they face when applying for citizenship or to access rights of all sorts.

[...]

This I call postlusotropicalism, playing with the similarity with the notion of post
colonialism, as the study of colonial continuations in the present. That is also why one cannot just denounce the colonial in the postcolonial. One should also acknowledge that, for better or worse, the colonial experience did create a common world of reference for many people. What we should do is work on this basic statement and set out to identify the intricate relations between power and emancipation, violence and pleasure in which such a forced commonality became a lived commonality.

It is as if we were all still caught in Freyre’s erotically charged vignette (because terrifying and pleasurable) describing sexual relations between a Portuguese male slave owner and his female black slave in 16th century Northeastern Brazil. This image still haunts us today, with its contradictions of power and intimacy, connecting the ambiguities of Lusotropicalism with those of Lusophony. That is why I have used the expression “Complex” in the title: both in the sense of “intricate” or “complicated”, and in the psychoanalytical sense.


[Extracts from here]


Related posts:


"Complexo de Colonizado"

Parafraseando

Feminismo Negro Brasileiro

Lusofonia e Antropologia

Lusofonia: Cultura ou Ideologia?

Conferencia Internacional sobre Cultura Tchokwe'


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