Carnation Revolution Research Articles

Measuring the carnation revolution: A synthetic control analysis of economic crisis in Portugal (1974-1992)

Measuring the carnation revolution: A synthetic control analysis of economic crisis in Portugal (1974-1992)

The Portuguese Hub of Companies in 1973 – Discussing the Corporate Concentration in the Portuguese Economy on the Eve of the April Revolution

The network of Portuguese companies in 1973 has been identified as a relevant element for understanding the economic structure of the country in the decade of 1970–1980. This network had been formed before 1974, during the dictatorship, but it remained after the Carnation Revolution. In spite of such research, this network has not yet been properly analysed, especially through adequate tools from network analysis. This work will detail this network, the different scores of centrality of each company, and their modular structures; it will also discuss estimates from exponential random graph models to identify significant attributes that explain the discovered flows of investment. This work will also detail the processes of vertical integration as well as the specificities of the identified oligopolies.

The Portuguese Road to Neoliberalism (1976–1989)

The Portuguese constitution, passed in April 1976, considered the nationalisations undertaken after the Carnation Revolution to be ‘irreversible’, prescribing a development model based on state planning. Changes made to the constitutional text, in 1989, allowed for a privatisation programme that curtailed government intervention and reinforced market provision. This mirrored a previous shift in the public sphere. Whereas political debate in 1976 was mostly centred on state-led development models, the next decade witnessed the rise of a pro-market approach. Two crises of the balance of payments encouraged a growing number of economists, businessmen, journalists and politicians to argue for the need to revise the constitution, enhancing the role and scope of markets. This article focuses on the rise of a neoliberal intellectual field in Portugal between 1976 and 1989, analysing its efforts to overcome the legacy of the Carnation Revolution and build a competitive market order in a semiperipheral context.

Postcolonial Images: From the Carnation Revolution to the Independence Processes. Publications for Propaganda, Resistance and Freedom (1974-1984)

À partir de l’étude du rapport indissociable entre histoire et photographie, ainsi que des formes de hiérarchisation des pouvoirs déterminant leur production et leur archivage, cet article analyse les images de la fin de l’empire colonial portugais, publiées dans des ouvrages de propagande et de contestation, de 1974 à 1984. Il offre une lecture comparative des contextes angolais et mozambicain. Caractériser les mécanismes de diffusion et de réception des images dites postcoloniales permet de reconsidérer leur dimension éthique et politique et de mieux appréhender le rôle de l’image dans la représentation de ce processus dans diverses parties du monde. La lecture croisée d’une sélection d’ouvrages éminemment photographiques tels que Resistência popular generalizada (Angola), Da resistência à libertação (Mozambique) ou Imagens de uma revolução (Portugal), éclaire la manière dont ils ont mis en relation deux forces apparemment opposées qui se sont mutuellement renforcés : l’indépendance des territoires et des peuples colonisés et la fin du régime dictatorial qui les opprimait.

Remarks on 40+ Years of Mechanical Engineering Teaching

Having obtained my licenciatura in Mechanical Engineering in 1973, I started an MSc in Applied Mechanics at Imperial College London the year after the carnation revolution in Portugal. Later, I prepared my PhD at Cranfield Institute of Technology (now Cranfield University). After 5 years in the UK, I returned to Porto with my MSc and PhD degrees to start an appointment as assistant professor at FEUP in 1980. Portugal was then struggling with a radical change of circumstances: from a country with overseas colonies, impoverished by a dictatorship and wars against liberation movements in Africa, to a European country and democracy with a dramatic lack of infrastructure. Research was certainly not a priority! In 1986 Portugal joined the European Communities, and in 1999 was one of the initial member countries adopting the Euro. Among other setbacks, bad choices of priorities (an excessive emphasis on services with neglect of manufacturing, or heavy investment in motorways with complete neglect of railways) marked the path until todays’ situation. Nevertheless, attention dedicated to scientific and technical research grew steadily in the past decades; and 2020 started with the country displaying good prospects as regards financial stability and renewed interest for manufacturing and exports. Having moved from assistant professor to full professor, with sabbaticals and visiting professorships in several countries, and participation in juries for selection of academic staff in many institutions, I had the possibility of witnessing the transformations in the engineering education scene in Portugal and elsewhere. The communication will discuss lessons learned throughout my 40+ years academic career, put in the context of a highly diversified set of external circumstances.

Local Political Power and Social Protection Policies for Elderly People in the Portuguese Context - An Exploratory Study

Since the Carnation Revolution in April of 1974, and the consequent approval of the Portuguese Republic Constitution (1976), the country’s legislative trend has been geared towards the expansion of local government power, in Portugal. This issue has acquired new relevance recently, with the new reconfiguration of the political decentralization process, through Law No. 50/2018, of 16th August. This is a gradual process, still ongoing, and delayed by the current pandemic situation. Local authorities play a decisive role in the country's development, both in the present and in the past. Initially focused on creating essential and basic infrastructures for the people, now includes other concerns, such as social protection. The definition and implementation of social policies, targeted to different populations, has become an essential axis of action, in a country marked by territorial disparities and an aging population. This study aims to understand the role of local administration in the characterization of social policies targeted at senior populations. The present work is a study of qualitative and explorative nature. Using documentary research and content analysis, we identified and characterized the measures aimed at the senior population implemented by two municipalities (Gouveia and Ourém). The analysis of the results allows us to conclude that the municipalities implemented measures that target the elderly population directly. Seniors also benefit from other measures, applicable to other age groups. It is important that the discussion focuses on these measures and the achievement of their goals. Measures to protect the elderly population are urgent, especially in a southern European country like Portugal, that has an ageing population, with a considerable increase in people aged 65 and over.

Remapping the Portuguese social space: Towards a Bourdieusian class scheme

Class analysis is intimately linked to the very development and consolidation of Portuguese sociology after the Carnation Revolution. Throughout the last decades, different research programmes assessed the nature and extent of class inequalities, drawing on Marxist, Weberian and functionalist paradigms. After a highly productive and intensely debated phase, a syncretic and compact approach prevailed. While this approach captures relevant features of class inequality, its current version overshadows critical aspects of difference and misrecognition in the social space in Portugal. From an analysis of occupational, qualifications and income data, we first propose a scheme of class fractions, which draws on the relational and multidimensional approach to class originally proposed by Bourdieu and recently taken up in European sociology. Using multiple correspondence analysis and nationally representative datasets, we demonstrate the validity of this tool for studying class and linkages to fields and its potential for replication in further statistical and qualitative research.

Growth formula: economy of Portugal after the “Carnation Revolution”

This article provides an overview of the Portuguese economy in the last quarter of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Assessing several key indicators of economic development within a historical perspective, the author highlights the most important factors that set the dynamics of national socio-economic growth. For more than four decades, since the “Carnation Revolution” (April 25, 1974), the Portuguese Republic has undergone profound changes in the economy and the socio-political sphere. In the country, there are new, as well as modernized traditional industries, a modern structure of production and consumption; GDP has increased six times, exports of goods and services have grown dramatically. In general, Portugal organically blended in the world economic system, took its rightful place in the global division of labor. One should take into account the effects of the global crisis of 2008-2009, when the Portuguese economy found itself in the epicenter of the “perfect storm” (pairing internal and external negative factors) and was pushed back in practically all key macroeconomic indicators. Despite such a system failure, in the second half of the 2010s, Portugal managed to cope with the peak of the crisis, overcame the general effects of the recession and began to show some of the highest rates of economic growth among the states of the euro zone. However, preservation of the positive economic dynamics is currently threatened by external challenges that require timely and effective response. Such challenges of global nature include the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic impact of which appeared to be a real shock for Portugal, as well as for many other countries in the world.

What We Recovered in the Revolution

A prolific political writer, Álvaro Cunhal—leader of Portugal's Communist Party for half a century and central figure of the 1974 Carnation Revolution—revealed in 1994 that he had also written several novels under the pseudonym Manuel Tiago. One of these novels, Five Days, Five Nights, was only translated into and published in English in 2020. The novella manages to capture the complexities, loneliness, and bravery of ordinary people, highlighting how we are the ones who keep us safe.

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography by Pamila Gupta

Portuguese Studies vol. 37 no. 2 (2021), 256–68© Modern Humanities Research Association 2021 Reviews Pamila Gupta, Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). 225 pages. Print and ebook. Reviewed by Paul Melo e Castro (University of Glasgow) A recent growth area in postcolonial studies has involved what one might loosely describe as ‘oceanic perspectives’. The attractions are obvious, in that such perspectives effectively provincialize Europe as one point in a network of exchanges and allow for a renovation of existing topics by recovering interconnections between former colonial spaces that a more national(ist) focus might occlude. Given that the bulk of Portuguese speakers are located around the South Atlantic and that a significant number, if not the majority, are of at least partial African descent, it is no surprise that Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic paradigm of a ‘counterculture of modernity’ emerging in the wake of the middle passage has provided the main inspiration within Lusophone Studies. Lately however, as attested by such works as Fernando Rosa’s The Portuguese in the Creole Indian Ocean (2015), among various articles and research projects, interest has also grown in how Isabel Hofmeyr’s countervailing Indian Ocean paradigm — in which processes of exchange long predate colonial modernity, even if increased and then informed by it — might bring about studies of the peripheral, less integrated, even residual eastern territories of the former Portuguese empire, stretching from Mozambique to India and onwards to Timor Leste. It to this emergent debate that Pamela Gupta’s Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World contributes, asking some searching questions of an original variety of ethnographic materials and historical junctures yet equally showing the risks that working across such a broad scope may entail. GuptahasdoneasignificantamounttointroducetheIndianOceanparadigm, being inter alia one of the editors of Eyes across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (2010). The present work collects a series of articles written subsequently and linking Angola, South Africa, Mozambique and Goa through the lens of decolonization, which the author pegs to two dates: 1961, when Goa was annexed by India, and 1975, when Angola and Mozambique achieved independence after the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. While 1975 is uncontroversial, whether 1961 represented decolonialization or recolonialization is a tricky subject, as the various debates put forward by Goa’s Al-Zulaij Collective show. One of this book’s main points of interest is the wide variety of subjects it traverses, taking in references to the work of Ryszard Kapuściński, Mia Couto and Ricardo Rangel alongside the life stories of the Goan fishing community of Catembe and White Portuguese Africans who left Angola and Mozambique Reviews 257 for South Africa. Decolonization becomes a way of discussing the messiness of lives that continued through traumatic breaks in the historical timeline. The section on ‘retornados’ (if I can bend the meaning of this word so much, though many of the ‘retornados’ to Portugal were hardly returning there either) in South Africa is fascinating, the most interesting in the book for me. We see how this exodus, which has been given less attention than the high-profile flux of Whites to Portugal, was driven by a complex mix of self-identification as white Africans and the desire to preserve the prestige that colonial status brought. The fine-grained discussion of these lives is neatly complemented by the inclusion of photographs by Ricardo Rangel detailing the 1975 settler exodus from Lourenço Marques, adding a contrasting viewpoint to the memories of the interviewees. The section on Goans in Mozambique is equally interesting, the interviewees’ recollection of their ambivalent entanglements with whiteness and blackness exemplifying what Cristiana Bastos, quoted, calls their ‘floating position’. When problems arise, it is often in point of detail and partly through the cursory treatment given some issues. Here for brevity I focus on two subjects I know something of. Can we simply discuss Ricardo Rangel’s photographs as ‘visual metaphors’? Does the analysis of such documentary photography not have to engage with its claims on reality as trace or metonymy? What proof is there that many of Rangel’s colonial-era photographs were destroyed by the Portuguese colonial state, rather than their publication simply...

Letters from ‘Glaucos’: The Correspondence of Guy Debord during the Portuguese Revolution

Abstract Guy Debord, founder of the Situationist International and filmmaker, kept a meticulous record of his correspondence between 1951 and 1994. Published by Fayard, the fifth volume of the correspondence includes several letters signed ‘Glaucos’ (a character from the Iliad), which were sent to Afonso Monteiro, Gianfranco Sanguinetti, Eduardo Rothe, and Jaime Semprún. In those letters, Debord developed several analyses of the ‘Carnation Revolution’, arguing that ‘the Portuguese proletariat’ had gone ‘further than the May 1968 movement’. Debord initially supported a local group called Conselho para o Desenvolvimento da Revolução Social, but he would later criticise it for not taking sufficient action. He also encouraged Jaime Semprún to write La Guerre Social au Portugal, a book published by Éditions Champ Libre in May 1975. This article analyses Debord’s correspondence in 1974 and 1975, offering a critical assessment of how he related to the revolutionary situation in Portugal.

Spectres of Today: The Fractures of History in Horse Money (2014)

It took Pedro Costa four feature films to get to Horse Money (Cavalo Dinheiro, 2014). In Down to Earth (Casa de Lava, 1994), a Portuguese nurse accompanies an immigrant worker in coma from Lisbon to his homeland, the Cape Verdean island of Fogo. Bones (Ossos, 1997), In Vanda’s Room (No Quarto da Vanda, 2000), and Colossal Youth (Juventude em Marcha, 2006) form a trilogy in which a group of Cape Verdean immigrants who lived in the Fontainhas slum becomes central. First travelling to Cape Verde, then getting to know and working with people from that Portuguese ex-colony on the outskirts of Lisbon, Costa’s films respond to the need for the voices of those who have been subordinated — the colonised, the discriminated, the exploited — to be articulated and valued. This article analyses the film style of Horse Money. It also pays attention to its thematic concerns and connections with other films directed by Costa, particularly those with Ventura, the central character in Horse Money. It argues that Horse Money tackles spectres haunting contemporary Portuguese society in a radical way, both politically and aesthetically. Its politics of representation are connected with the composition of a fractured history. These fractures emerge from the liberation of Cape Verde from Portuguese colonial domination as well as from the conflicting ruptures and continuities after the 1974 Carnation Revolution. In line with such an approach to these themes, the use of digital video, which has become common in Costa’s cinema since In Vanda’s Room, achieves hauntingly expressive qualities through mise-en-scène and image modulation.

The Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics of Migration in Contemporary Art from Angola and Its Diaspora

The Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics of Migration in Contemporary Art from Angola and Its Diaspora

Women Architects in Portugal: Working in Colonial Africa before the Carnation Revolution (1950–1974)

How did women architects shape a modern world in the late period of Portuguese colonial Africa, just before the Carnation Revolution? The specific role of women in Portugal working in colonial African architectural culture has now started to be addressed by Portuguese and Lusophone-African historiography. During the 1950s, the presence of women in the metropolitan schools of architecture was reduced. Of those who could graduate, few actually worked as architects. Most were absorbed by the commonly feminine roles, resulting from marriage and from the ideal of family promoted by the Estado Novo dictatorship. To the ones that risked prosecution for working outside the family, the option of jobs associated with the feminine universe, such as teaching, was privileged. Among those who were emancipated from this pattern, the majority worked in familiar partnerships, regarded as an extension of marriage. The women architects that follow the husbands in their African emigration often ended up having the opportunities to work in their professional field partly due to the lack of qualified technicians, and to the high demand of commissions. This paper not only seeks to outline a perspective on these women, but also tries to understand the context of their work by presenting two case-studies in the late in the late period of Portuguese Colonisation: Maria Carlota Quintanilha and Maria Emilia Caria.

"Urbanistic Architecture" According to Raul Lino

Over a period of nearly one hundred years, Raul Lino (1879-1974) experienced the profound political, social and economic changes that marked the twentieth century in Portugal. Having been born during the Constitutional Monarchy (1822-1910), he lived through the First Republic (1910-1926), the Military Dictatorship (1926-1933), the Second Republic, or Estado Novo (New State, 1933-1974), and died shortly after the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974, at the dawning of the Third Republic. He was an architect who published prolifically in Portugal, having become known through his advocacy of the Campanha da casa Portuguesa (Portuguese House Campaign), which provoked a great deal of controversy. The debate peaked with the Polémica da casa Portuguesa (Polemic of the Portuguese house) at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in 1970, after the inauguration of the retrospective exhibition on Raul Lino. He is less known for the quality of his transversal synthesis conceived between urbanism, architecture, the decorative arts, and its underlying affirmation of an idea of the city, which we conjecture from our analysis of his narrative. This analysis concentrates on eleven case studies that encompasses architectural projects, urbanistic plans and technical advice limited to the first half of the 20th century. The broad, cross-disciplinary position of Lino was defended in the same year as the First National Architecture Congress (1948), whose proposals ratified in Portugal the orthodoxy principles of modern architecture and urban planning for the new universal man-type, established in 1933 by the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM). Quoting Aristotle, Raul Lino conceived the city as the locus of happiness, shaping forms of consensus between tradition and modernity by means of an architecture at the scale of man and in proportion to his circumstance, consistently outlining a modern possibility of continuity.

Democracy and Intelligence Culture in Portugal (1974-2019): A Complex Relationship

ABSTRACT This article addresses intelligence in the aftermath of the Portuguese so-called Carnation Revolution of 1974, which would end up in the birth of a new democratic state in April 1976. It maps all the legal transformations of intelligence in democratic Portugal and analyses the main ones, putting into evidence its historical evolution, organization, and democratic control, arguing that there are three critical moments. The birth of civilian intelligence only in 1984, the 2004 reform that led to a modern and effective intelligence system, and the recent attempts to access to metadata in 2017, which show that the authoritarian legacy of PIDE-DGS is finally fading away among the political decision-makers. The double legacy of the authoritarian regime and the revolutionary process of transition to democracy influenced until very recently the Portuguese intelligence culture, being its democratic structure, a political outcome conducted by the politics of memory.

“Perseguindo os ventos do tempo”: Jovens, pasado composto e futuros possíveis

On the occasion of the publication of the latest book in Spanish by Jose Machado Pais (Youth and creativity, 2020), this conversation with Carles Feixa reviews the personal and intellectual career of this Portuguese sociologist, one of the leaders in youth studies in Europe and Latin America. After evoking the teenage and youth of the protagonist in Portugal in the 1970s -around the red carnation revolution of 1974 that ended the Salazarist dictatorship- and reviewing his academic influences, the text focuses on his contributions to the study of Portuguese and later European youth, as well as their connections with researchers from Brazil and Latin America. In the final part of the article he exposes the origin and content of the last of his books, in which he gathers five fundamental essays on youth creativity. This search for «the winds of time» does not imply any value judgment on young people in general or on a generation in particular, but rather an epistemological bet to reveal the hidden faces of a social emergency, projecting towards the future -or towards the no future- the complexities of the past.

From the Editor: The Autumn of Our Discontent

From the EditorThe Autumn of Our Discontent John Nieto-Phillips (bio) 25 de Abril Esta é a madrugada que eu esperavaO dia inicial inteiro e limpoOnde emergimos da noite e do silêncioE livres habitamos a substância do tempo Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, 1974 A new day has dawned, at least in theory. One week ago, voters in the United States chose Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to lead the country. The election was not the landslide "blue wave" many had expected, but a nail-biter that hinged on mail-in ballots and marginal victories in swing states. A record 78 million Americans voted for Biden and Harris, 5 million more than voted for President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. Though Electoral College votes for well exceed the 270 threshold for a Biden/Harris win, the incumbents refuse to concede, alleging (without evidence) massive fraud by election officials. The election was stolen, they claim. Defying decades of practice and convention, Trump loyalists insist there will be no "smooth transition" of power. And COVID-19 is raging. For those who have endured four years of precarity, loss, and hardship, Biden's election bodes important changes. Their hopes are distilled in the words of Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen: "Esta é a madrugada que eu esperava." The iconic poem "25 de Abril" captured the resonant promise of a new day, when Portugal's dictatorship was peacefully deposed, "o dia inicial inteiro e limpo / onde emergimos da noite e do silêncio." Famously, no shots were fired during the 1974 Carnation Revolution. Instead, celebrants filled the streets and followed the example of the pacifist Celeste Caeiro in placing carnations in the muzzles of armed soldiers. May our political transition be as peaceful. The election portends a new day for many Latinx voters, many of whom have borne the brunt of Trump's draconian policies on immigration, healthcare, education, the economy, and the environment. Exit polls suggest that Latinx voters, impressively, cast 13% of all votes, equaling the figure for African Americans for the first time in a national election. However, this election has also reminded us that Latinx votes are neither homogenous nor predictable. There is no uniform [End Page 1] "Hispanic vote." Rather, Latinx citizens are incredibly diverse in their views and votes, according to Geraldo Cadava, author of The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump (2020). Fully one-third of self-identified Hispanic or Latina/o voters opted for Trump. In Florida, for example, Cuban and Venezuelan Americans helped Trump win the state by three percentage points. What, exactly, does the future hold for most Latinx communities and individuals? What will be the fate of more than 700,000 Dreamers, whose legal status hangs in the balance? Or the 545 migrant children who were separated from their families by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials and whose parents cannot be located? These and many other issues impacting Latinx communities are the source of intense speculation. One thing is clear, however: in the face of a pandemic and innumerable challenges, Latinx voters mobilized and voted in larger numbers than ever before. The long-vaunted Sleeping Giant—so dubbed by media outlets to describe the Latinx population's massive yet latent political power—has been roused. And it is far from monolithic. This issue is a compendium, of sorts, focusing on migrant stories, lives, and futurities. It features an exclusive interview by Ylce Irizarry of the acclaimed writer Angie Cruz. In scholarly articles by Micah Donohue, Amanda Ellis, and Gretel Vera-Rosas, we learn how both fiction and documentary film mediate and map transborder lives and bodies. In moving essays by Francesca Cricelli, Andrew Bentley, Guillermo Reyes, and Cecilia Villarruel, we discern, variously, the adventure or the angst of the uprooted (os desenraizados, in Portuguese), and psychic toll imposed by one's coming and going (el vaivén, in Spanish) between home and homeland, between languages and social codes. Our pages also are graced with creative works by Rodrigo Figueroa Obregón, Ana María Hontanilla, Christen Sperry García, Joe Crawford, and María del Rosario Lara, and Diego Javier...

&etc and Vitor Silva Tavares

&etc and Vitor Silva Tavares Emanuel Cameira (bio) “There are books and there’s merchandise. The difference between the two is the difference between poetry and capitalism.” — Vitor Silva Tavares (2010) Many are those who currently consider the book trade a business just like any other. The unorthodox publishing company &etc operated in the antipodes of this logic. A historical Portuguese publishing house, it was a sort of poetry in action “in the few remaining pools of life” (the phrase belongs to Jason Epstein’s famous 1963 text, “A criticism of commercial publishing”). As Jean Dubuffet wrote in his Asphyxiating Culture (1968) — an iconoclastic essay which fed the ideological azimuths of &etc — the notion of culture as it is conceived today, essentially a culture of advertising, is naturally driven to cherish the most heavily simplifying works, so as to lend them better to the mechanisms of advertising, and then to gradually transfer the principle of the value of works to their advertising value. Click for larger view View full resolution Taking this into account and assuming in the line of Pierre Bourdieu that the action of publishing “is turning the unofficial into official — publishing is breaking up a censorship,” it should be noted that everything separated &etc from the rules that animate the editorial media system. Broadly speaking, it was a small, independent, literary publishing house based in Lisbon, whose activity began on the eve of the Carnation Revolution (the 1974 revolution that ended the Portuguese authoritarian regime). In fact, it was not “just another case” in the Portuguese literary publishing scene of the last four decades — it went out of business following the death of Vitor Silva Tavares (1937-2015), the publisher, the life and soul of &etc. Its main traits included a return to certain forms of craftsmanship and knowledge, the rejection of a purely mercantile relationship with books, the promotion of marginal literary discourses, and the association with specific aesthetic groups (its initial connection to a particular wave of Portuguese surrealism should be marked). Starting in the mid-1960s as a supplement in a regional newspaper (Jornal do Fundão), it later emerged as a separate magazine of the same name and then as the book publishing house (1973-2015). In the second half of the twentieth century in Portugal and specifically as far as the sphere of literary publishing was concerned, Vitor Silva Tavares corresponded almost perfectly to the archetype of the wholesome cultural intervener, giving a printed voice and legitimizing literary and artistic lines that otherwise would hardly have come into the field. Driven by the ethical mission of printing the necessary book, the activity of the selfless publisher of &etc, according to Nuno Medeiros, did not anchor “its steps and its selection and mediation apparel in the perception produced about what the market — taken as the demand — aspires to and the reception behaviors it demonstrates.” With a barely viable publishing model, since it only made profits between 1980 and 1985 (the period when the volume of titles published by &etc was the highest — from 1982 to 1984, Silva Tavares published twenty-two annual titles, twice as many as he printed in other productive years, excluding 2001), this publishing house, of primarily cultural characteristics, survived to a large extent thanks to the efforts of Célia Henriques (a partner in the publishing company, and Silva Tavares’s second wife) who capitalized the company whenever necessary (her contribution was not merely creative, as she also produced multiple translations), the result of the affective/sentimental relationship that linked Henriques to the publisher. This privileged situation, almost a patronage that Vitor Silva Tavares put to the service of others (because he could, and had the opportunity), dragging behind him, giving voice to authors of different generations and aesthetic proposals, is therefore sociologically relevant, since it leads one to conclude that the (generous) editorial action was economically determined by an anti-mercantilist logic, not guided by economic dictates, or by the search for “argentarium capital gains.” Moreover, the operation of a small and fragile structure such as Silva Tavares’s publishing house was quite permeable to circumstances of the personal lives of the publisher and some of his collaborators...

The Cultural Production of Lusophone Africa

The Cultural Production of Lusophone Africa Claire Williams The Portuguese colonial presence in Africa stretched over five centuries, until Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe achieved independence in the wake of the 1974 Carnation Revolution. For much of the twentieth century, imperial literary and cultural production tended to objectify and exoticise the populations of these countries, with a few exceptions, amongst which are the seminal novels published between the late 1930s and 1950s by Angolan author Fernando Monteiro de Castro Soromenho. Two short story collections that had an immediate and lasting impact were Luandino Vieira's Luuanda (1963) and Luís Bernardo Honwana's Nós matámos o cão-tinhoso (1964). Luuanda led to a confrontation between the Portuguese Writers' Association and that country's dictatorial regime, and Nós matámos o cão-tinhoso foregrounded the situation of the assimilado (a legal category recognising a level of 'civilised' behaviour in Black African citizens) under colonial rule. The independence struggles of the 1960s and 70s galvanised authors and artists to express their protests and mobilize their people. Revolutionary leaders, such as Amílcar Cabral (Guinea-Bissau), Agostinho Neto (later the first President of an independent Angola), and Marcelino dos Santos (Mozambique), wrote rousing poetry, as did Alda Espírito Santo (São Tomé), Noémia de Sousa (Mozambique), and José Craveirinha (Mozambique). Many of them had met while studying abroad at the Casa dos Estudantes do Império in Lisbon. Their works were anthologised and translated, and, as more literature from Portuguese-speaking Africa became accessible, literary critics like Manuel Ferreira in Portugal, and Russell Hamilton and Gerald Moser in the United States, began to analyse and teach them on university courses.1 Writers' associations, such as the União dos Escritores Angolanos (founded in 1975) and the Associação dos Escritores Moçambicanos (founded in 1982), became important sources of support for aspiring writers. However, brutal civil war wreaked havoc as the newly independent countries fought their way to peace. The inequality of colonial rule was a recurrent theme in pro-independence protest literature, but it was soon replaced with criticism of different kinds of injustice: the upheavals and atrocities resulting from war, poverty, and displacement became the subject of later works, often attempting to come to terms with the traumas of the past. As well as dealing with these traumas, Portuguese-speaking African regimes have embraced global capitalism from the early 1990s onwards, to the detriment of forging a more equitable society, especially in oil- and diamond-rich Angola. Political corruption and social inequality have therefore been topics covered by more contemporary writers. In their introduction to the first special issue of the journal Research in African Literatures to be devoted to Lusophone African and Afro-Brazilian Literatures (2007), Lúcia Helena Costigan and Russell Hamilton acknowledge that African literature in Portuguese has often been neglected in favour of the English and French equivalents. This is still true, to a certain extent, but in the decade and a half since then, although there has not yet been a Nobel Prize for African literature [End Page 451] in Portuguese, many more writers are getting published (in their own countries and/or Portugal), as well as being translated into different languages, while their works have been turned into films or plays. Some of them—like Mozambicans Mia Couto, Paulina Chiziane, and João Paulo Borges Coelho; Angolans Pepetela, José Eduardo Agualusa, and Ondjaki; or Cape Verdean Germano Almeida—now reach international readerships, winning prizes and becoming the subjects of academic monographs. The postcolonial turn in the 1990s gave literary critics new tools with which to read and interpret the writing emerging from African nations. African literature in Portuguese were published in Portugal in special series by Porto Editora and Caminho since the 1970s, and were already being taught at some universities. This paved the way for critical readings and literary analyses published by academics such as Pires Laranjeira, Manuela Ribeiro Sanches, Ana Maria Martinho, Ana Mafalda Leite, and Inocência Mata. International scholars also began working more closely with Lusophone Africa: Laura Cavalcante Padilha, and Carmen Tindó Secco in Brazil...