History
De escravos a indígenas: O longo processo de instrumentalização dos africanos (séculos XV-XX)
Abstract:
De Escravos a Indígenas: o Longo Processo de Instrumentalização dos Africanos (Séculos XV-XX), which brings together a set of texts written over forty years and dispersed in publications of diverse nature, not always easily accessible, aims to contribute to a renewal of historiography on the relations between Portugal and Africa, in the specific field of the forms of instrumentalisation of Africans carried out by the Portuguese for almost five centuries. A long process, whose internal nature proved capable of metamorphosis and reconversion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ensuring the continuity of the violent ‘use’ of African populations, resorting to a new classificatory apparatus – savages, indigenous, assimilated – aimed at keeping Africans within the sphere of Portuguese domination, contributing to legitimising their enslavement and fixing distorting interpretations of History.
If a first line of study aims to review the history of slavery and slave trafficking and their ideologies in spaces of Portuguese ‘occupation’ like Angola, a second line of study privileges iconographic documents as historical sources, emphasizing their historical and informative dimension. Finally, the third line of this study seeks to highlight the evolution of the process of Portuguese instrumentalisation of Africans, which resorts to unprecedented classificatory categories – savage, indigenous, assimilated – and to practices that emerge from the slave labour of the past to ensure the colonial exploitation of African populations.
Value judgments, commodification, objectification, exploitation, ridiculing of African men fabricated Portuguese imaginaries that reduced the black/African to slavery, the savage/indigenous to lazy, thieving and drunk, the assimilated/’civilised’ to a ridiculous and negative copy of the white/Portuguese, enshrining the inferiorization of Africans, and in the same movement, glorifying the Portuguese ‘race’, hierarchizing the humanities and valuing the dimension and nature of the Portuguese actions, first slave-owning and then colonialist, that have left their mark on Portuguese society to this day.
Quotation:
Henriques, Isabel C., De Escravos a Indígenas: o Longo Processo de Instrumentalização dos Africanos (Séculos XV-XX), Lisboa, Ed. Caleidoscópio, 2019.
Literatures and Cultures of the Indian Ocean
Abstract:
Portuguese Studies is a biannual multi-disciplinary journal dedicated to research on the cultures, literatures, history, and societies of the Lusophone world. Ana Mafalda Leite, Elena Brugioni, and Jessica Falconi were the organizers of this issue of the journal, Literatures and Cultures of the Indian Ocean. The president of the Editorial Board for 2021 is Catarina Fouto, and the Journals editor is Emanuelle Rodrigues Dos Santos. The journal is published by the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA), an international organization with members in all parts of the world. The aim of the Association is to encourage and promote advanced study and research in the field of modern humanities. It is concerned to break down barriers between scholars working in different disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic scholarship in the face of increasing specialization. The present volume results frorn the scholarly work conducted by members of the research project NILUS — Narratives Ofthe Indian Ocean in the Lusophone Space. The main purpose of the project consisted in establishing a theoretical and disciplinary connection between Lusophone Literary, Visual and Cultural Studies and the transdisciplinary field Of Indian Ocean Studies. The project on the written and visual narratives hailing from, or related to, the territories formerly colonized by Portugal along the Indian Ocean, specifically Mozambique, Goa, and East Timor. This volume, therefore, constitutes an attempt to bridge a significant critical and disciplinary gap, motivated by an almost total lack of dialogue among the above-mentioned fields of study. This lack of dialogue becomes ever more apparent if we bear in mind the increasingly central role played by historical, anthropological, literary, and cultural studies of the Atlantic Ocean in addressing colonial and postcolonial cultural and identity-related outputs and relations from the territories that Out Of Portuguese colonial rule. Consider, for instance, the influence of the notion of Brown Atlantic (Atlântico Pardo), de,’eloped by the anthropologist Miguel Vale de Almeida as a counterpoint to Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, or the use of the Portugal -Brazil-Angola triangulation in comparative and transnational- oriented literary and cultural studies.4
Quotation:
Leite, A.M.; Brugioni, E. & Falconi, J. (2021) (eds). “Literatures and Cultures of the Indian Ocean”, Portuguese Studies 37.2.
História de São Tomé e Príncipe: da descoberta a meados do século XIX
Abstract:
In História de São Tomé e Príncipe: da descoberta a meados do século XIX, the author explains how the Portuguese navigators arrived on the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe in the third quarter of the fifteenth century and transformed them into a social context for their development, but in which human and institutional relations were complex and even unbearable for the most disadvantaged, particularly on the island of São Tomé. Conflicts of all kinds worsened, particularly after the transition from a residential to a plantation society, with the intensification of the slave trade and the production and export of sugar. The long distance of the islands from the central power, located in Lisbon, constituted an ingredient that favoured the fomentation of conflicts in which the disrespect for the established rules was permanent and maintained during the period of domination of the native elite since the 17th century, marked around the main families that disputed access to power and control of wealth. The author shows that, despite its harshness, the colonial slave model had dynamics of social mobility that allowed some enslaved people to become free and others to become powerful in economic and political terms, even during the 16th century, becoming dominant until the mid-19th century.
Quotation:
Espírito Santo, A. (2021). História de São Tomé e Príncipe: da descoberta a meados do século XIX. Lisboa: Edições Colibri.
Historical Guide to an African Lisbon
Abstract:
Lisbon, a city of as many valleys and hills as there are myths surrounding its history and the people who invented it, stretches along the Tagus, where the river ends its course through Iberian land and plunges into the Atlantic Ocean. Lisbon was born on the hill of São Jorge Castle, where a Bronze Age settlement left its traces, which crossed with many other marks engraved by Greeks, Phoenicians, Lusitanians, Romans, Visigoths, Arabs, Jews and Christians. A long road of people and cultures, of stories and legends, of gods and heroes who, like Ulysses the mythical founder of the city – Olisipo – which owes its name to him, built and rebuilt this urban space. The aim of Historical Guide to an African Lisbon, XV-XXI Century is to show Lisbon’s Africanness, dispersed in a plurality of memories and immaterial and invisible traces in the days in which we live. History tells us about the settlement and life of thousands of Africans who for centuries took part in the process of building the Portuguese national fact. Travelling through the city, armed with historical knowledge, we are surprised by the vigorous African presence that invaded all spaces of Lisbon society, we reconstruct a hidden Lisbon, submerged by a centuries-old prejudice that still dominates our collective imagination and we understand, with greater clarity, not only behaviours, values, practices that remain in urban daily life, but also the constant reinventions of Portuguese and African identities, present in the country.
Quotation:
Castro Henriques, I. (2021). « Historical Guide to an African Lisbon, XV-XXI Century», versão revista e actualizada, Lisboa, Edições Colibri, 2021.
Manuel Viegas Guerreiro: «Ovakwankala (Bochimanes) e Ovakwanyama (Bantos): aspectos do seu convívio». Uma interpretação histórica.
Abstract:
The research and study of hunter-gatherer societies developed significantly within the framework of a mainly neo-evolutionist social and cultural anthropology, particularly Anglo-American, in the 1950s and 1960s. Africa constituted a privileged space for this type of study which sought to highlight the intimate relations of these populations with the environment in which they lived and on which they depended, but also the consequences, on their evolution, of the development and consolidation of the European colonial systems, which forced changes in their territorial framework of circulation, leading them to situations at the limits of survival. In a more precise manner, in the intellectual context of the time, linked to values and principles which marked the valorisation of nature, knowledge of ecosystems, the advance of ecology – in particular American cultural-ecology or ecological anthropology – as a way of thinking about the world and humanity’s relations with the surrounding spaces, there was also a multiplication of studies seeking to underline the virtues and benefits of these societies, which were called the first societies of abundance (Marshall Sahlins, 1968). But the history of these societies always remained silent, the written documents were fragile and knowledge of these human groups was based on the idea of a long, multi-secular path marked by the constancy of their acts, their practices and their lives. This absence of movement was incompatible with the notion of change, which is indispensable to the evolution – and therefore the history – of societies. The very notion of “society of abundance” referred to the recognition of a supposed “wealth” of hunter-gatherers, who found in the surrounding nature everything they needed to live in a comfortable situation, which solved their food needs, dispensed with relations with other peoples, and guaranteed free time and rest, which easily allowed them to carry out their social and religious practices. This was an idyllic vision that referred back to previous historical times, almost without movement, and to the absence of significant transformation and change processes in their historical situation. In Manuel Viegas Guerreiro: «Ovakwankala (Bochimanes) e Ovakwanyama (Bantos): aspectos do seu convívio». Uma interpretação histórica. Isabel Castro Henriques comments on the homonymous study conducted by Manuel Viegas Guerreiro.
Quotation:
“Castro Henriques, I. (2021). «Manuel Viegas Guerreiro – Ovakwankala (Bochimanes) e Ovakwanyama (Bantos): aspectos do seu convívio. Uma interpretação histórica. Lisbon, Newsletter Fundação Manuel Viegas Guerreiro, no 27, julho-setembro 2021, pp. 10-16.”
Voices, Languages, Discourses: Interpreting the present and the memory of Nation in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe
Abstract:
Voices, Languages, Discourses: Interpreting the Present and the Memory of Nation in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe brings together a selection of interviews with writers and filmmakers from Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe in order to examine representations and images of national identity in these countries’ postcolonial narratives. It continues and completes the exploration of the postcolonial imaginary and identity of Portuguese-speaking Africa presented in the previous interview volume Speaking the Postcolonial Nation: Interviews with Writers from Angola and Mozambique (2014). Memory, history, migration and diaspora are central notions in the recreation and reconceptualisation of the nation and its identities in Cape Verdean, Guinean and São Tomense literary and film culture. By bringing together different generations of writers and filmmakers, with a wide variety of perspectives on the historical, social and cultural changes that occurred in their countries, this book makes a valuable contribution to current debates on post-colonialism, nation and identity in these former Portuguese colonies.
Quotation:
Leite, A., M., Falconi, J., Krakowska, K., Kahn, S., Secco, C. (2020). Voices, Languages, Discourses: Interpreting the Present and the Memory of Nation in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe. Oxford, United Kingdom: Peter Lang Verlag. Retrieved Oct 6, 2022, from https://www.peterlang.com/document/1055586
Sobre a Metodologia Qualitativa: Experiências em psicologia social
Abstract:
Often, the reference to qualitative methodology leads us to the great controversy about the scientificity of the social sciences in comparison with the natural sciences and to doubts about the attribution of the status of “science” to the social field, studied in Sobre a metodologia qualitativa: experiências em psicologia social. There are those who argue that this attribution (of scientificity) will only be possible if the same procedures are applied to the social that are used to understand the natural. For others, on the contrary, the important thing is to claim the total difference and specificity of the human field and to show that the work for the knowledge of the social must reach the symbolic, historical and concrete orders. In the symbolic dimension, the meanings of the subjects are included; the historical dimension – of time consolidated in the real and analytical space – includes the fact that social actors resort to their experience and memory to recompose facts that took place within their temporality. The concrete dimension is related to the structures and social actors in relation. Hence the statement that the social sciences deal with phenomena marked by relativity, unpredictability and specificity.
Quotation:
Évora, Iolanda. 2011. “Sobre a metodologia qualitativa: experiências em psicologia social”. Comunicação apresentada nos Seminários em Psicologia, Universidade Autonomia de Lisboa
Brief Paper 5/1998: A Questão da Origem dos Angolares de São Tomé
Abstract:
We intend to make a dispassionate and impartial interpretation, free of any nationalist charge, of this chapter in the history of São Tomé. There are at least three different hypotheses about the origin of the Angolares. The oldest and most widespread says that the Angolares are descendants of the survivors of a slave ship from Angola that sank off the southern coast of the island in the mid-sixteenth century. The second hypothesis states that the Angolares were already present when the Portuguese arrived, since they are descendants of a Bantu people with great maritime skills who came to São Tomé with their own canoes. According to the third hypothesis, the Angolares are neither descendants of castaways, nor are they an indigenous population of the island; rather, they must be descendants of Cimarrones, runaway slaves from the first sugar cane plantations after the 16th century. Before dealing consecutively with the three hypotheses, we would like to present some data about the Angolares. Paper presented at the 1998 CESA Seminar: A Problemática do Desenvolvimento – Historicidade e Contributos Actuais numa Óptica Transdiciplinar (The Problem of Development – History and Current Contributions from a Transdisciplinary Perspective), Conference on A Questão da Origem dos Angolares em São Tomé (The Question of the Origin of the Angolares in São Tomé), 19 May 1998.
Quotation:
Seibert, Gerhard. 1998. “A questão da origem dos Angolares de São Tomé”. Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão – CEsA Brief papers nº 5-1998.
Brief Paper 2/1995: A Constituição do Estado Moderno em África: O problema das fronteiras: a propósito de um artigo de Wole Soynka
Abstract:
The constitution of the modern state in Africa is inevitably linked to the Berlin Conference and, inevitably, it is also loaded with a symbology that characterises it as one of the main events in the historiography of modern Africa. This idea seems a little exaggerated to us, as Elikia M ‘BOKOLO points out in “Afrique Noire Histoire et Civilisations”, since, if on the one hand, the Conference was essentially the result of a German initiative, a power which, compared to its European counterparts, had fewer interests in Africa, on the other, it in fact corresponded, roughly speaking, to the regulation of questions arising from the commercial exploitation of the territories that each country claimed for its sphere of influence. In fact, this question of effective occupation became the core of other questions at the heart of the game of European powers and the confrontation of their interests, but it was, above all, the origin of a polemic that has not ceased to disturb international public opinion to this day, also becoming, on the African side, one of the main points as regards its political, economic and social evolution. In fact, the problem of the intangibility of borders has become, especially in recent times and after the rise to independence of most African nations, one of the most worrying issues for national entities and international bodies. A constituição do Estado Moderno em África : o problema das fronteiras : a propósito de um artigo de Wole Soynka was elaborated within the scope of the course História de África of the Master in International Development and Cooperation taught at the ISEG/UTL, of which Prof. Joana Pereira Leite is in charge.
Quotation:
Borges, João Melo. 1995. “A constituição do Estado Moderno em África : o problema das fronteiras : a propósito de um artigo de Wole Soynka”. Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão – CEsA Brief papers nº 2-1995
Working Paper 183/2021: Dans le Dernier Sursaut de l’Estado da Índia (1951-1961): Témoignages inédits de deux femmes portugaises
Abstract:
During the last decade of Estado da Índia, the testimonies of two Portuguese women who embark on a trip to Goa have caught our attention, getting us to write Dans le dernier sursaut de l’Estado da Índia (1951-1961) : témoignages inédits de deux femmes portugaises. Born in 1926 and part of the first generation of Estado Novo, the authors belong to an educated elite and share an acute political awareness of the regime, choosing even to engage in the metropolis opposition movements. They left Portugal for Goa, the territory of their political exile, a society totally alien to them and an important moment of personal experience. The last decade of the Portuguese domination sign the last burst of Estado da Índia which is moving towards the return of its territories to the Indian Union in 1961. The stories left by these two women articulate a history of the Portuguese empire, learned on school benches, portraying an experience of the Salazarist regime and the confrontation of the authors’ experience in Goa. There they make their way on a tightrope, created both by the distance to the colonial administration and by the difficult penetrability of Goan society. In this interface and stemming from an everyday of existential precariousness, they get to know this society and engage in the cultural and political challenges that cross it. Back in Portugal and later on, one of the authors write her memories and the other wish for the exposure of the letters, that she daily written to her family . The memoirs and letters constitute a counterpoint testimony, on the one hand to that of the Portuguese of the Empire (whose statuses and belonging were defined in a colonial society) and, on the other, to that of the diasporas belonging to the Empire (Portuguese, Goans , Indians) by where it is also interesting to read the center from its periphery. Their testimonies and their reflections have very current accents on the way of writing, of thinking and living on existential, material, and symbolic borders that both separate and unite people.
Quotation:
Khouri, Nicole e Joana Pereira Leite (2021). “Dans le dernier sursaut de l’Estado da Índia (1951-1961) : témoignages inédits de deux femmes portugaises”. Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão – CEsA/ CSG –Documentos de Trabalho nº 183/2021.
