Managing Luso-Utopia in Guinea-Bissau: Imperial Fictions and Dwelling Practices in Late Portuguese Colonialism (1945-74)

Abstract

Portugal ruled Guinea-Bissau (then Portuguese Guinea), one of the last European colonial empires, until 1974, when the fifty-year dictatorship was overthrown and the colony dismantled. Until that time, its power had been maintained through the productive nationalist fiction, commonly referred to as luso-tropicalism, that the Portuguese created peaceful multi-racial colonial cultures through miscegenation. This paper examines the spatial production of this fiction as a concrete political utopia in the empire’s last phase in Africa, from 1945 to 1974, by looking at how colonial spatial practices in Guinea-Bissau contributed to both the assembling and the disassembling of empire. Grounded in original archival and field research conducted in Guinea-Bissau from 2019 to 2023, this paper asks what architectural and urban planning practices supported the fruition of a luso-tropical horizon. This involves analysing not only experts and their designs, but also how these contributed to everyday experiences of space through which Portuguese and Guineans dwelled in the luso-tropical utopia. Dwelling is here understood as both a set of architectural practices that define housing and city as well as the lived experience of urbanity. This approach enables a critical examination of how Portugal’s enduring imperial fiction was produced, managed, and lived in colonial spatialities, while also identifying the residue from colonialism that has persisted from these dwelling experiences into the present. This article, thus, expands the field of colonial architecture historiography by presenting a little-known case study which exposes architecture’s ties to governance, violence and resistance; it also assesses the political effects and residues of a colonial utopia in the present, by addressing the lived experience and agency of Guineans in architecture history.