The Portuguese Empire and the Lusophone ...

http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/diaspora.20.1.001 - Klobucka Anna M. - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 9:00:51 AM - University of Massachusetts Dartmouth IP Address:134.88.63.137

Diaspora 20:1 (2011) / published Spring 2018

The Portuguese Empire and the Lusophone Postcolony as Diasporas Anna M. Klobucka University of Massachusetts Dartmouth The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora: Seven Centuries of Literature and the Arts. Darlene Sadlier. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. 286 pages.

The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora is an ambitious repository for a selective yet extraordinarily wide-ranging assembly of cultural artifacts drawn from the entire history of the Portuguese empire and Lusophone postcolony. Within the chronological expanse ranging from 1415 to (roughly) 2015, the book stages a storytelling enterprise of encyclopedic breadth and scope, skillfully intertwining historical accounts with brief vignettes and longer analyses of a wide array of artistic objects, from literary works to maps, paintings, decorative arts, sculpture, and cinema. Given the study’s broad definition of diasporic experience (which encompasses a variety of often nonpermanent or short-term dislocations) and its guiding focus on “imperially produced hybridity that is characteristic of lusophone culture” (72), the book is best read as a lively history of hybrid cultural processes and legacies of the Portuguese empire rather than as a sustained reflection on the diasporic condition as such. Keywords: Portugal, Brazil, Lusophone, colonialism, hybridity

The cover of Darlene Sadlier’s The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora features Alfredo Cunha’s famous 1975 photograph of piles of wooden crates, some displaying names and destinations painted in large block letters, heaped up on Lisbon’s Belém pier next to the Monument to the Discoveries. This monument, named Padrão dos Descobrimentos in Portuguese, was originally conceived of and constructed (of perishable

Anna M. Klobucka, “The Portuguese Empire and the Lusophone Postcolony as Diasporas,” Diaspora 20, 1 (2011): 117–122. © 2018 Diaspora: a journal of transnational studies. 117


Diaspora 20:1 (2011) / published Spring 2018 materials) in 1940 as part of the Exhibition of the Portuguese World, mounted by Salazar’s dictatorship as a celebration of Portugal’s national and imperial identity; it was dismantled when the exhibition closed but re-created in 1960 as a permanent monument. It consists of a stylized silhouette of a caravel, with thirty-two historical figures connected to Portugal’s so-called “Age of Discovery” assembled in two rows on the ship’s prow, behind the leading statue of Henry the Navigator, the mastermind and patron of early Portuguese maritime exploration in the fifteenth century. The crates piled up next to the monument in Cunha’s photo belonged to a few of the approximately 600,000 Portuguese colonial settlers who returned to their ancestral homeland, mainly from Angola and Mozambique, following the independence of Portugal’s African colonies between 1974 and 1975. These retornados (returnees), as they are collectively known, became the most palpable aspect of the decolonization process viewed from the perspective of the colonial metropolis, their demographic mass amounting to nearly 7% of the country’s entire population at the time of the Portuguese Revolution of Carnations (which put an end to the New State dictatorship and its remaining imperial domain, wracked by wars of independence since the early 1960s). The juxtaposition featured in Cunha’s image provides a singularly fitting framing for The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora, whose time line extends over the seven centuries, bookended, on the one side, by the maritime and military pursuits promoted by Henry the Navigator and his contemporaries (with the Portuguese conquest of Ceuta in 1415 marking the historical starting point of the colonial expansion) and, on the other side, by present-day sociocultural effects of Portuguese colonialism and decolonization. Even more fittingly, the image represents a book that concerns itself centrally with people on the move—more so than with what is commonly understood as diasporas (more on which below)—in diverse historical contexts and capacities that encompass “population travel and displacement resulting from colonization, adventure seeking, religious conversion, political exile, forced-labor movements, wars, economic migration, and tourism” (2). In so doing, it provides an ambitious and capacious repository for what can be described as a selective yet extraordinarily wide-ranging assembly of cultural artifacts drawn from the entire history of the Portuguese empire and Lusophone postcolony. A cursory look at the book’s table of contents might lead the reader to hypothesize that its seven chapters correspond to the seven centuries named in its title. This is not the case, however, although Sadlier does retain chronological progression as an organizing principle for moving her narrative along from 1415 to (roughly) 2015. The first four chapters, from “The Imperial Diaspora” to “Into the Wilderness: The Race to Africa and the Promise of Brazil,” span the historical range from the fifteenth to the early twentieth century, while the remaining three chapters and the epilogue focus on the late colonial and postcolonial period of Portuguese and Lusophone history. Within this expanse, the reader is 118


The Portuguese Empire and the Lusophone Postcolony regaled with a storytelling enterprise of encyclopedic breadth and scope, which skillfully intertwines historical accounts with brief vignettes and longer analyses of a wide array of artistic objects, from literary works—beginning with Luís de Camões’s epic poem The Lusiads (1572), which chronicles Vasco da Gama’s inaugural voyage to India in 1498–1499—to maps, paintings, decorative arts, sculpture, and, eventually and prominently, cinema. The roster of writers and artists discussed by Sadlier and listed in the book’s index ranges from Jorge Afonso, the sixteenth-century painter of Adoração dos Reis Magos (Adoration of the Magi), in which the realistically depicted African king is the focal figure of the scene, to Tizuka Yamasaki, Brazilian director of the 1980 film Gaijin: Os caminhos da liberdade [Gaijin: Roads to Freedom], a portrayal of the first Japanese who immigrated to Brazil in early twentieth century to work on coffee plantations. What Sadlier posits as the element gluing all these pieces of her vast mosaic together is the notion of diaspora, understood in a very broad sense as “the dispersion of any kind of population”—in this case, of “the Portuguese-speaking groups that have been scattered throughout what was once the Portuguese empire” (2). The restriction of the author’s field of vision to Portugal’s imperial domain results in the exclusion from her inquiry of the communities that are arguably most likely to be discussed by present-day scholars under the rubric of “Portuguese diaspora”—that is, those constituted by Portuguese migrants who, particularly throughout the twentieth century, sought better economic conditions and opportunity in wealthier Western European countries, as well as in the United States, Canada, Australia, and other destinations unconnected to the Portuguese empire. In many cases, their migratory movements, as well as the literary and cultural production that has flourished in response to their diasporic condition, can be said to bear a vivid connection to Portugal’s relationship with its colonies, for example when in the 1960s many young men and families with adolescent sons were compelled to flee their country for the above-named destinations for fear of being drafted to fight in Portugal’s colonial wars in Africa. Portuguese colonialism and its aftermath also propelled migratory movements of many colonial and postcolonial subjects who were displaced well beyond the confines of the empire. Perhaps the most vivid illustration of the latter phenomenon may be offered by the Cape Verdean diaspora, which, since the nineteenth century, has spread into the United States and a number of Western European countries, in addition to Portugal, its other African colonies, and Brazil. Literary works, such as Baltasar Lopes’s novel Chiquinho (1947), the founding text of modern Cape Verdean literature, in which the prospect of emigrating to the United States in his father’s footsteps looms brightly on the protagonist’s horizon, and the short stories of Orlanda Amarílis, with their wealth of embodied migratory experiences lived by the writer’s mainly female characters, draw on the global network of displacement and hybridity that, although propelled by the historical reality of 119


Diaspora 20:1 (2011) / published Spring 2018 Portuguese imperialism, has robustly exceeded the geocultural boundaries of the empire and its postcolony. A couple of miles from where I sit writing this review is the neighborhood of Fox Point in Providence, Rhode Island, where the history of the community of Cape Verdean American residents (by now largely relocated to other areas by economic pressures of gentrification) is compellingly told by Claire Andrade-Watkins in her documentary Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican? A Cape Verdean American Story (2006). These three examples (among many others that could be evoked) form a thick web of material and symbolic correspondences with the artistic and literary reflections of Cape Verdean diaspora in Portugal that Sadlier’s study does discuss (such as the films of Pedro Costa), and it seems somewhat disappointing that the author’s alignment of her perspective with the Portuguese empire’s geographical self-definition does not allow her to pursue this prospective wealth of meaningful extrapolations. Considering that its liberally comprehensive characterization of “diasporic” experience encompasses such a variety of often nonpermanent or short-term dislocations (e.g., late nineteenth-century exploratory travels in Africa by Alexandre de Serpa Pinto, Hermenegildo Capelo, and Roberto Ivens), and given its guiding focus on “imperially produced hybridity that is characteristic of lusophone culture” (72), The PortugueseSpeaking Diaspora is probably best read as a lively history of hybrid cultural processes and legacies of the Portuguese empire rather than as a sustained reflection on the diasporic condition as such. In what sense, for example, can Teodoro, the protagonist of Eça de Queirós’s novella O mandarim [The Mandarin], who undertakes a single, relatively short-lasting voyage to China, be considered a diasporic subject? Perhaps he is only featured in the chapter on “Oriental Imaginings and Travel at the Turn of the Twentieth Century” to set up a contrast with effectively rooted lived experiences and writings of two Portuguese expatriates in the Far East, Venceslau de Moraes and Camilo Pessanha, who are discussed further on in the chapter. But if one reads O mandarim as an example of the distinctive vein of Portuguese Orientalism— as Sadlier suggests we should—then the consideration of Teodoro’s predicament becomes a relevant contribution to the book’s mapping of the cultural effects of colonial expansion, although it would be desirable to understand more clearly why and how Eça’s novella stands as a “striking exception” (102) to the European literary tradition of othering the Middle East and Asia as discussed and theorized in Edward Said’s Orientalism. Similarly, viewing Eça’s protagonist Carlos Fradique Mendes, the fictional author of A correspondência de Fradique Mendes [The Correspondence of Fradique Mendes], as a self-proclaimed touriste who “perfectly fits the profile of the nineteenth-century grand tour connoisseur” (127) is an illuminating and promising premise in and of itself, regardless of its lack of pertinence to the analysis of diasporic subjects proper (although the Fradique Mendes reimagined by José Eduardo Agualusa in his 1997 120


The Portuguese Empire and the Lusophone Postcolony novel Nação Crioula [Creole Nation], also discussed by Sadlier, does migrate to Brazil as a settler after a shorter sojourn in Africa). The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora is clearly designed as a resource for college-level instructors and students pursuing the study of the Portuguese empire and postcolonial Brazil, Lusophone Africa and Asia, and Portugal (whether in dedicated courses or in a comparative framework); as such, it can be unequivocally recommended. The historical episodes and narratives sketched out by Sadlier, as well as her brief or extended analyses of individual works (whether novels, films, travelogues, altarpieces, bronze sculptures, etc.), can easily be envisioned as prospective springboards for undergraduate or graduate research projects. Similarly, entire chapters as well as their subsections may serve as blueprints for lectures or as helpful guidelines for designing course sequences. A few segments of the book also stand on their own as strong contributions to primary scholarship on their respective subjects, although on the whole, that does not appear to be the study’s aim. It engages only minimally with postcolonial theory (as in the cursory reference to Said’s Orientalism noted above) or theory of the diaspora, and its discussions of works of art and literature for the most part bypass existing scholarship on the authors and texts in question. Nonetheless, Sadlier’s treatment of several of her topics escapes this pattern. For example, in chapter five, “The Casa dos Estudantes do Império and Mensagem,” Sadlier offers a focused study, based on archival research and oral interviews, of the famed Lisbon institution, which “began in late 1943, when a group of university students from Angola proposed the founding of a cultural center that would provide a space for meetings, mutual support, and social and cultural events” (141). She provides a comprehensive close reading of Casa’s periodical publications, Mensagem (1948–1952 and 1959–1964) and Boletim (1957–1959), rightly emphasizing, in particular, Mensagem’s “significance as the vehicle that launched some of Africa’s most important writers, not to mention several of the leaders in the struggles for independence” (144), such as poets Alda Lara (Angola), Noémia de Sousa (Mozambique), and Alda de Espírito Santo (São Tomé and Príncipe)—the latter lamentably misidentified here as “one of Cape Verde’s leading poets” (149)—as well as the towering figures of anticolonial resistance Amílcar Cabral and Mário Pinto de Andrade, among others. This tightly focused chapter contrasts with the patchwork-like design of most of the others, but this is not a negative observation. In fact, alternating fast-paced, synthesized segments of historical narrative with more leisurely and in-depth examinations of selected figures and issues (e.g., the eight-page discussion of African-Brazilian poet Domingos Caldas Barbosa in chapter two or, in the same chapter, the section “Machado de Assis on Race”) is one of the most appealing aspects of Sadlier’s approach. Rich in content and potential and abundantly illustrated—with twenty-five color plates and several dozen black-and-white figures—The 121


Diaspora 20:1 (2011) / published Spring 2018 Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora is a notable achievement, and the reservations voiced in this review should not detract from its overall commendable quality and the wide variety of ways in which it can serve as a highly valuable resource for scholars and teachers alike. Anna M. Klobucka is Professor of Portuguese and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Her most recent book, co-edited with Hilary Owen, is Gender, Empire, and Postcolony: Luso-Afro-Brazilian Intersections (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

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