Portuguese Colonial Research Articles

Space invaders? slavery, gender, and the remapping of Eighteenth-Century Portuguese imperial geographies

ABSTRACT This article explores the site of the Rossio square in Lisbon as a contested urban space between the dispossessed and the Portuguese imperial authorities over the eighteenth century. Focusing on the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake, it examines how enslaved and freed women of African and Afro-Brazilian heritage from the Portuguese colonies used and reconfigured the Rossio through their direct confrontations with the imperial authorities. Reading against the grain of traditional manuscript sources, this article demonstrates how contestations of the Rossio not only illuminated and underscored the dependence of the metropolis on the labour of Afro-diasporic enslaved and freed women, but also enabled these women to create alternate geographies of empire and power that pushed back against imperial spatial constructions.

Unimaginable Community: Watchwords and Frelimo's Abandoned Nationalism in Independence-Era Mozambique

AbstractDuring its decade-long war (1964–74) against Portuguese colonialism, Frelimo developed a language to express the style in which it imagined the nation. On taking power in 1975, Frelimo used this language — its watchwords — to signal the shared identity it aimed to instill within Mozambique. Frelimo asked Mozambicans to live in the future tense: to turn away from familiar idioms of belonging and embrace a sense of self and other untethered to past or present. The misalignment between this vision and its reception is most evident at local levels of administrative action, where people at lower rungs of the state received Frelimo's watchwords and creatively applied them, transforming ideas into practices. Many Mozambicans were unable or unwilling to accept Frelimo's vision, and as civil war engulfed more of the country in the early 1980s, Frelimo abandoned this nationalism, exchanging it for an idea of national community people could more easily imagine.

Legacies of the Portuguese Colonial Empire: Nationalism, Citizenship and Popular Culture, Elsa Peralta and Nuno Domingos (eds) (2023)

Review of: Legacies of the Portuguese Colonial Empire: Nationalism, Citizenship and Popular Culture, Elsa Peralta and Nuno Domingos (eds) (2023) London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 288 pp., ISBN 978-1-35028-977-2, h/bk, £85

Original plant diversity and ecosystems of a small, remote oceanic island (Corvo, Azores): Implications for biodiversity conservation

Remote islands harbour many endemic species and unique ecosystems. They are also some of the world's most human-impacted systems. It is essential to understand how island species and ecosystems behaved prior to major anthropogenic disruption as a basis for their conservation. This research aims to reconstruct the original, pre-colonial biodiversity of a remote oceanic island to understand the scale of past extinctions, vegetation changes and biodiversity knowledge gaps.We studied fossil remains from the North Atlantic island of Corvo (Azores), including pollen, charcoal, plant macrofossils, diatoms and geochemistry of wetland sediments from the central crater of the island, Caldeirão. A comprehensive list of current vascular plant species was compiled, along with a translation table comparing fossilized pollen to plant species and a framework for identifying extinctions and misclassifications.Pollen and macrofossils provide evidence for eight local extinctions from the island's flora and show that four species listed as ‘introduced’ are native. Up to 23 % of the pollen taxa represent extinct/misclassified species. Corvo's past environment was dynamic, shifting from glacial-era open vegetation to various Holocene forest communities, then almost completely deforested by fires, erosion and grazing following Portuguese colonisation. Historical human impacts explain high ecological turnover, several unrecorded extinctions and the present-day abundance of vegetation types like Sphagnum blanket mire.We use Corvo as a case study on how fossil inventories can address the Wallacean and Hookerian biodiversity knowledge gaps on remote islands. Accurate baselines allow stakeholders to make informed conservation decisions using limited financial and human resources, particularly on islands where profound anthropogenic disruption occurred before comprehensive ecological research.

Beyond Nation and Empire? Questioning the Role of Religious Missions under Portuguese Colonial Rule at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

From the beginning of European overseas expansion in the fifteenth century, religious missions occupied an important place in the internal organisation of colonial empires. Their contribution to the ideological structuring of imperialism and the interaction with local populations is undeniable. With the emergence of the new imperialism and the scramble for Africa (after the 1870s), the missions, often anticipating the colonial political and administrative presence, enhanced their role as advocates of Europe’s “civilising mission”, above all through the education of the colonised peoples. For Portuguese decision-makers, the religious missions, with a multi-century tradition, had an important role in defending territorial claims overseas and promoting the empire’s nationalisation. However, the lack of national missionaries, Christianity’s inter-confessional competition in the nineteenth century and the emergence of international legal rules protecting missionary activities hindered Portugal’s strategies. Using sources from several archives (in Lisbon, the Vatican, and elsewhere) to emphasise the role of a transnational missionary staff and the international law of missions, this text intersects these aspects, examining their convergence in the controversial case of the exit and replacement of Jesuit missionaries in Mozambique in 1910–1911, to demonstrate the need to look at the missionary issues in the Portuguese overseas domains from perspectives that go beyond nation and empire.

The Cult of Our Lady of Fátima, Portuguese Colonialism, and Migration, c. 1930–c. 1980

Emerging in 1917 amidst the anxieties of World War I, the Cult of Our Lady of Fátima began with a vision witnessed by three shepherd children in rural Portugal. News of the apparition quickly spread, drawing hundreds, then thousands of pilgrims to the Cova da Iria. This potent symbol of faith soon transcended its origin, migrating in the form of venerated statues and dedicated shrines that sprouted across the globe. Particularly intertwined with Portuguese emigration, the cult’s reach extended to former colonies in Africa and Asia (“Ultramar”) and distant communities like Brazil. Statues of Our Lady became beacons of familiarity and solace, offering “homes away from home” for displaced populations. This essay focuses on the discourses surrounding the cult between the early 1930s and 1950s, exploring how Fátima served as a focal point for navigating the social, political, and cultural conflicts inherent in the emigration experience.

A weapon of responsibility: the lyric cry in Alda Espírito Santo’s and Maria Manuela Margarido’s negritude poetics

As a symbolic enunciation of Black subjection and resistance, the cry has functioned as a central trope in negritude poetics. This essay revisits the trope by focusing on another geography of the negritude imagination beyond the francophone world. I analyse how the work of two women poets from the African archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe, Alda Espírito Santo (1926–2010) and Maria Manuela Margarido (1925–2007), reorients the cry as a modality of decolonial critique. I argue that they intentionally mobilize the sonorous force, intensity, and frequency of the cry in their poetry to grapple with the colonial ritual of terror in the Portuguese empire. In the intersection of mourning and resistance, the cry functions as both a critique of colonial violence and the voicing of radical hope for a decolonial future. This essay brings postcolonial and decolonial thought into conversation with lyric studies as it maps out the connection between Espírito Santo’s and Manuela Margarido’s poetry, intellectual work, and political activism. It illuminates the entanglement of the voice, power, and resistance in negritude poetics.

“Mortu Nega”: A Decolonial Film or a Film about Decolonization?

While discourse surrounding decolonization is not new, in recent years it has gained significant momentum with many advocating for its implementation as a means to address historical injustices. However, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s thought-provoking book, coupled with the movie “Mortu Nega”, invites us to critically examine the concept of decolonization. This article aims to present an argument that challenges decolonization narratives by exploring the potential limitations and unintended consequences of embracing decolonization as an absolute solution for humanitarian issues in African societies. To accomplish this, I will begin by providing historical context on Guinea-Bissau, the former Portuguese colony that serves as the focal point of the film. Furthermore, this article will provide a comprehensive description of Flora Gomes’ film, followed by a discussion addressing the trope of decolonization theory. I will use the persistent lack of women’s emancipation and their ongoing struggle for genuine liberation and gender justice in Guinea-Bissau as an example of the need, following Táíwò’s thought, to rethink the uses of decolonization as a tool for analyzing Africa’s issues.

Plantations Beyond Monocrops: Cannabis Ecologies From Colonial Angola to São Tomé

São Tomé, a small island in the Gulf of Guinea and a former Portuguese colony, is an exemplary place to analyze the development of plantation “cropscapes.” These cropscapes emerged around sugar in the sixteenth century, evolved with coffee in the 1850s and consolidated with cocoa from the 1880s onwards. While is impossible to ignore the monocultural nature of São Tomé plantations and the centrality of specific plants for these plantation ecologies, there were other human/plant assemblages, that sustained, subverted or ran parallel to plantation goals of production, profit and power. This article zooms into cannabis to explore different relations between plantation working peoples and plantation environments, between suffering, healing, and violence, between labor, pleasure, and power. It will examine how cannabis was part and parcel of the lives of peoples from Angola recruited to São Tomé and, consequently, of the island's plantation worlds in the late nineteenth century. It will also discuss how colonial discourses on cannabis obscured and silenced the presence of this plant in contemporary plantation histories, regardless of its traces in the archive. Cannabis histories are in fact important ones: they counter imperial master narratives by showing how, even under conditions of exploitation, laboring communities and plants co-produced spaces of autonomy, care and leisure.

Women, Children, and Enslaved People in the Portuguese Empire in Asia: Introduction

Recent studies on the Portuguese empire in Asia during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries have highlighted the role and relationships of resistance and sociability among women, children, and enslaved individuals in that context. Often tied to institutional histories, these themes are traditionally understood through the framework provided by legal restrictions and privileges. The studies gathered here aim to emphasize the stories of women, children, and enslaved individuals, incorporating perspectives that shed light on narratives of resistance, tactics, negotiations, solidarities, and disputes led by these agents in the Portuguese empire in Asia. This text serves as the introduction to the special theme section on Women, Children, and Enslaved People in the Portuguese Empire in Asia, 16th-18th centuries, organized by the authors.

O Feitiço do Império: a encenação do universo colonial português nas exposições de 1932, 1934 e 1940

This article focuses on the Estado Novo in the early 1930s and 1940s. The aim is to examine the Portuguese colonial imaginary, based on the visual narrative developed at three exhibitions: the Great Portuguese Industrial Exhibition of 1932, the First Portuguese Colonial Exhibition in 1934, and the Colonial Section of the Portuguese World Exhibition in 1940. In all cases, the Empire was exhibi-ted in miniaturised form through groups of villages and dwellings characteristic of the different colonies, including indigenous people and specimens of local fauna. These visual communication forms provided a sensual immediacy that allowed access to the general public, inspired by the staging techniques of ethnographic environments that had been established in major exhibitions since the mid-1800s. The purpose is to analyse the expositive scenographic forms used, drawing on the resulting iconographic universe, of a propagandistic nature — mainly magazines and films — seeking to understand the process of cultural objectification to which the Portuguese colonial universe was subjected.

Spaces of Dis/Harmony in Colonial Goa. Lefebvre’s Spatial Dynamics and the Convent of Santa Mónica, 1606-1740

This paper explores the interplay of Henri Lefebvre’s conceived, perceived, and lived spaces in the Real Convento de Santa Mónica, a nunnery located at the heart of the Portuguese Asian empire, in Goa, India. The sense of harmony produced by the conceived and perceived spaces, frameworks that produced a particular habitus among the nuns, which in turn facilitated congenial lived spaces that aligned with the nuns’ aspirations, was significantly disrupted by an external authority, the Archbishop of Goa Ignácio de Santa Teresa, in the early eighteenth century. The archbishop’s desire to curb the power of the Orders and elevate the local Goan ecclesiastical institutions had an unintended effect: it introduced a state of disharmony into the lived space of the nuns, and thus the dialectic between habitus and space led many nuns to experience the convent not as a place of calm and refuge, but rather as a prison. This article is part of the special theme section on Women, Children, and Enslaved People in the Portuguese Empire in Asia, 16th-18th Centuries, guest-edited by Rozely Vigas and Rômulo Ehalt.

Slavery, Family and Childhood in the Portuguese Diaspora in Southeast Asia, 16th-17th Centuries

The Portuguese communities in Asia were mainly concerned with maritime commerce, which required long periods on board. The families of most of these merchants resided on land, in cities such as Goa, Cochin, Malacca and Macao, and included numerous slaves of different geographical origins and ethnicities, also characterized by their young ages. This article examines the presence of enslaved children and youths in Portuguese last wills, which have been studied concerning the confraternities of Misericórdia of Porto and Macao, in a chronology that covers the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The present approach aims to combine family history, childhood history, and history of law, in order to highlight the presence of enslaved children and youths as family members. This article is part of the special theme section on Women, Children, and Enslaved People in the Portuguese Empire in Asia, 16th-18th Centuries, guest-edited by Rozely Vigas and Rômulo Ehalt.

Interview with Arlindo Manuel Caldeira: the slave trade in the Portuguese Empire

Resumo: Nesta entrevista, Arlindo Manuel Caldeira aborda a origem do tráfico transatlântico de escravizados, seu interesse pelos estudos de temas relacionados à história da África e da colonização do Império Português. No diálogo com o entrevistador, ganham relevâncias os assuntos sobre as fontes de pesquisa e a importância dos estudos sobre a história da escravidão numa perspectiva de revisar a história do trabalho no Brasil.

Kirishitan Women in Bondage Defying Persecution in Japan, 1625-1630

This article inspects cases of three Kirishitan (Christian) women servants in the Jesuit accounts of Shimabara, Japan, between 1625 and 1630, arguing that global and national changes resulted in the worsened enslaving conditions for servant-class women in Japan. The arrival of Portuguese traders and the Jesuit mission in the mid-sixteenth century, the Jesuits’ initial engagement in the slave trade, the ongoing civil wars, Japan’s invasion of Korea, the shogunate’s total ban of Christianity and Iberian commerce, and its consolidation of patriarchal structures by the 1640s accelerated the decline of women’s status. The sources, read in this context, show that under severe religious persecution, these women’s Kirishitan identity was crucial in their resistance to the multiple systems of oppression. This article is part of the special theme section on Women, Children, and Enslaved People in the Portuguese Empire in Asia, 16th-18th Centuries, guest-edited by Rozely Vigas and Rômulo Ehalt.

Phantasmal Crusaders. Decaying Millenarianism and the Trauma of Colonial War in Twentieth-Century Portuguese Literature

The article focuses on the connection between the early-modern roots of Portuguese millenarian mythology and the literature dealing with the trauma of the colonial war that put an end to the Portuguese empire in 1975. The analyzed texts of José Martins Garcia, Manuel Alegre, João de Melo, António Lobo Antunes, and Almeida Faria de- construct the providential vision of Portuguese colonial empire ex- ploited by the official propaganda of Salazar. They transcribe the grandiose, mythicized image of the Portuguese past into the cate- gories of grotesque and phantasmal. Both soldiers and settlers trans- formed into refugees by the colonial war continue moving in the oneiric universe as traumatized subjects long after the end of the con- flict. The literary deconstruction of the national mythology con- ducted by the writers, many of whom were ex-combatants of the conflict, may thus be seen as a collective therapy postulated by Ed- uardo Lourenço, leading to the healing of the trauma.

Governadoras: Women Administrators, Gender, and Colonization in Sixteenth-Century Portuguese America

In sixteenth-century Brazil, several European women governed the captaincies of their late or absent husbands during the first century of Portuguese colonization. A contextual and lexical analysis of the male-authored sources reveals that these women acted decisively to protect and expand familial patrimonies and, in doing so, were part of the colonizing movement. Although extensive written evidence survives that attests to their authority and agency over colonial affairs, their importance has been overlooked in the scholarship. Therefore, this essay argues that a small group of elite European women became imperial agents who wielded power against colonial subjects in select circumstances.

Collective Awareness and Lyrical Poetry: The Emergence of Creole Literary Culture in the Archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe

The problem discussed in the article is the emergence of the autonomous literary system on the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, a former Portuguese slave emporium, as well as coffee and cocoa producing colony. Several concurrent narrations concerning the emergence of the Santomense literary system are presented. One of them accentuates the groundbreaking role of a particular institution, Casa dos Estudantes do Império; other narrations inscribe the literature of the tiny archipelago in a larger system of Portuguese-speaking literature (Lusophony). The author of the present article postulates a radical enlargement of the chronological and cultural perspective, including the legacy of the Angolars (rebellious slaves) and their collective awareness in the genesis of the local literary tradition, in parity with such elements as the legacy of the Portuguese colonizers and free Creole social groups (Forros). It could be a way of overcoming the Eurocentric “chronopolitics” that remained valid also in the postcolonial studies, associating the decolonial processes, on the one hand, with the metropolis as a place where the decolonial thought took shape, and on the other, with the chronology, rhythms, and trends of its literary evolution.

Linguistic Contact and Portuguese-to-Spanish Document Translation During the Iberian Union

The present paper discusses document translation and analyzes the translation from Portuguese to Spanish of a report of the Council of Portugal, which describes the political-administrative situation of the Moluccas Islands. The concepts of bilingualism and diglossia (FISHMAN, 1967) are used to discuss the colonial translation scenario, and the taxonomic framework provided by Barbosa (2004) supports the translation analysis. The main research tools are the selection and editing of manuscripts, and the classification of translation procedures. Results indicate the historical study of document translation between Portuguese and Spanish as a new research field, mainly involving contact between languages; the tendency towards literality as the main feature of Iberian Union (1580-1640) administrative translation, as these are technical documents; punctual translator interference, with instances of source-text omission and rewriting; and the possible comparison between document translation in Asian and American Portuguese colonies.

The Making of Imperial Public Sphere on Portuguese Colonialism

This article explores the concept of the Imperial Public Sphere (IPS) in the Portuguese empire as a space for confrontation and negotiation within the framework of nineteenth and twentieth-century European colonial empires. In order to demonstrate the origin of political and ideological power, the emergence of IPS is characterized and its fundamental structures identified. The protagonists of IPS are revealed as the ‘imperial’ and ‘colonial’ elites. It concludes with the IPS hypothesis that the press and journalism are structures, institutions and mechanisms of political, social and cultural power that are essential for understanding colonial empires.