Imperial Debris: Reflections on the Lisbon Cityscape in Contemporary Portuguese Fiction

Patrícia Martinho Ferreira

doi:10.21471/jls.v5i2.325

Abstract

This essay focuses on the literary image of contemporary Lisbon. Through an analysis of the anthology Lisbon Tales and Trails (2017) and Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso (2018), I examine how Lisbon’s representation on a global stage exposes the complexities and ambiguities of a metropolitan area deeply connected to the legacies of empire. Moving through fictional texts from the city center to the suburban periphery, I offer a focused reflection on Lisbon’s postcolonial/post-imperial ethnoscape.

Highlights

This essay focuses on the literary image of contemporary Lisbon
The book Lisbon Tales and Trails, a collection of work by twenty writers and twenty illustrators first published in Portuguese in 2016 under the title, Guia ver e ler Lisboa, is marketed as a pocket guide and promoted by the Lisbon city council as a way to approach Lisbon through an artistic lens
There are the tens of thousands of commuters who pour into the Lisbon city center every day to work

Summary

Martinho Ferreira

The book Lisbon Tales and Trails, a collection of work by twenty writers and twenty illustrators first published in Portuguese in 2016 under the title, Guia ver e ler Lisboa, is marketed as a pocket guide and promoted by the Lisbon city council as a way to approach Lisbon through an artistic lens. When summarizing the exceptionality of the neighborhood of Arroios, Epalanga’s narrator states: “in no other neighborhood in the center of the city is it possible to savor a cultural miscegenation as old as the idea of Portugal itself” (103) This may seem at first to convey a celebratory and uncritical view of the present-day ethnic and cultural diversity of Lisbon; such views were common under the Salazarist regime, and they worked mostly to justify the existence of the empire. It is worth emphasizing here that the narrator’s nostalgia seems to be pointing to the sort of imperial debris described by Ann Laura Stoler that one still finds throughout Lisbon’s “coffee houses, restaurants, and pastry shops that keep imperial names, decorations, and memories” (Coelho 183) In this regard, the sense of loss and sadness described by Epalanga’s narrator is intimately related to a certain postimperial topography, to “streets, architecture, and monuments that were either purposely crafted to engage in the colonial venture or to celebrate it” (Coelho 190). One can claim that the celebration of Lisbon’s multiculturalism in “From Avenida Almirante Reis to Areeiro” does not hide social tensions, which are endemic to a society that for centuries has defined itself in relation to its empire and still looks to understand its postcolonial reality

Under the Light of Lisbon

Final Remarks

Works Cited