Mixed Race Studies

An Earth-Colored Sea: ‘Race’, Culture and the Politics of Identity in the Post-Colonial Portuguese-Speaking World

Berghahn Books
2003
176 pages
index
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-57181-607-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-57181-608-5

Miguel Vale de Almeida,  Professor of Anthropology
Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa (ISCTE), Lisbon

Although the post-colonial situation has attracted considerable interest over recent years, one important colonial power – Portugal – has not been given any attention. This book is the first to explore notions of ethnicity, “race”, culture, and nation in the context of the debate on colonialism and postcolonialism. The structure of the book reflects a trajectory of research, starting with a case study in Trinidad, followed by another one in Brazil, and ending with yet another one in Portugal. The three case studies, written in the ethnographic genre, are intertwined with essays of a more theoretical nature. The non-monographic, composite – or hybrid – nature of this work may be in itself an indication of the need for transnational and historically grounded research when dealing with issues of representations of identity that were constructed during colonial times and that are today reconfigured in the ideological struggles over cultural meanings.

Contents

• Foreword and Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1. Potogee: Being Portuguese in Trinidad
• Chapter 2. Powers, Products, and Passions: The Black Movement in a Town of Bahia, Brazil
• Chapter 3. Tristes Luso-Tropiques: The Roots and Ramifications of Luso-Tropicalist Discourses
• Chapter 4. “Longing for Oneself”: Hybridism and Miscegenation in Colonial and Postcolonial Portugal
• Chapter 5. Epilogue of Empire: East Timor and the Portuguese Postcolonial Catharsis
• Chapter 6. Pitfalls and Perspectives in Anthropology, Postcolonialism, and the Portuguese-Speaking World
• Epilogue: A Sailor’s Tale

The Colours of the Empire: Racialized Representations during Portuguese Colonialism

Berghahn Books
February 2013
308 pages
26 ills & tables, bibliog., index
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-85745-762-2
eBook ISBN: 978-0-85745-763-9

Patrícia Ferraz de Matos, Professor of Anthropology
University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

Translated from the Portuguese by Mark Ayton

The Portuguese Colonial Empire established its base in Africa in the fifteenth century and would not be dissolved until 1975. This book investigates how the different populations under Portuguese rule were represented within the context of the Colonial Empire by examining the relationship between these representations and the meanings attached to the notion of ‘race’. Colour, for example, an apparently objective criterion of classification, became a synonym or near-synonym for ‘race’, a more abstract notion for which attempts were made to establish scientific credibility. Through her analysis of government documents, colonial propaganda materials and interviews, the author employs an anthropological perspective to examine how the existence of racist theories, originating in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, went on to inform the policy of the Estado Novo (Second Republic, 1933–1974) and the production of academic literature on ‘race’ in Portugal. This study provides insight into the relationship between the racist formulations disseminated in Portugal and the racist theories produced from the eighteenth century onward in Europe and beyond.

Contents

• Tables and illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Origins of a prejudice: the roots of racial discrimination
  • The discovery of human variety: early formulations
  • The emergence of ‘modern’ racism
  • Racialism under attack
• Chapter 2. Discourse, images, knowledge: the place of the colonies and their populations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire
  • The formation of Portuguese colonialism and ‘colonial knowledge’
  • The Colonial Act and the ‘creation’ of the Indígena
  • Colonial propaganda: ‘marketing the empire’
  • Colonial representations in primary and secondary school readers
  • Cinema and colonialism in action: moving pictures on colonial themes (1928-53)
  • Recurrent images and prejudices
  • The production of ‘anthropological knowledge’ of the colonies
  • Racial purity, miscegenation and the appropriation of myths
• Chapter 3. Exhibiting the empire, imagining the nation: representations of the colonies and the overseas Portuguese in the great exhibitions
  • The age of the great exhibitions
  • Representations of the Portuguese colonies, 1924-31
  • A ‘Guinean village’ at the Lisbon Industrial Exhibition (1932)
  • The Portuguese Colonial Exhibition of 1934: concept and objectives
  • Representations of the Portuguese colonies, 1934-39
  • The Exhibition of the Portuguese World (1940): concept and objectives
  • Colonial representations in Portugal dos Pequenitos
  • The status of the colonized populations at the exhibitions: the exotic vs. the familiar
• Conclusions
• Appendix I: Film
• Appendix II: Texts from the padrões of Portugal dos Pequenitos
• Bibliography

Creolization of the Atlantic World: The Portuguese and the Kongolese

Portuguese Studies
Volume 27, Number 1 (2011-03-01)
pages 56-69

Francisco Bethencourt, Professor of History
King’s College, London

In the 1930s, Gilberto Freyre’s praise of mixed-race people in Brazil challenged the idea of white supremacy, contributing to the building of a new Brazilian identity. In the 1950s, Freyre projected the idea of openness and racial mixture onto the Portuguese empire, fuelling Salazar’s colonial propaganda. The idea of Lusotropicalism was contested by Marvin Harris and Charles Boxer, who demonstrated that there were very few mixed-race people in Angola and Mozambique, and exposed the long history of racism in the Portuguese colonies. However, the fashionable notions of hybridism and creolization have been putting Freyre back on the map. The article exposes the limits of Freyre’s approach of inter-ethnic relations, structured around the flexibility (or otherwise) of white colonists. It engages with the much more interesting but problematic approach suggested by Linda Heywood and John Thornton, who shifted to Kongo and African agency the creolization of the Atlantic. It suggests a reassessment of the real Christianization of Kongo and its complex chronology, drawing attention to the royal interests of conversion, the limits of conversion among the population, and the conditions for erosion of Christianity in the long run.