Portuguese Decolonization Research Articles

Singularities of Timor-Leste’s Process of Self-Determination (1974–2002)

Abstract The self-determination of Timor-Leste presents singular features in contexts of Portuguese decolonization and global politics. It spans three periods: Portugal’s territorial reconfiguration after the Carnation Revolution; re-colonization under a major international player in global decolonization; and direct involvement of the United Nations in final phases leading to independence. It distinctively combines struggle for self-determination with a plight for broad human rights. A transnational multitude of actors, from colonial and neo-colonial powers to the UN and leading regional and world powers, blended state diplomacy with “citizens diplomacy” arising from the mobilization of civil society and the impact of international public opinion.

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...

Gupta, P. (2019). Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World. History and Ethnography. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 160 p

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An archaeology of decolonization: Imperial intimacies in contemporary Lisbon

The fall of the European empires over the course of the 20th century forced massive migratory flows from the former colonies to the old metropolis and between colonized regions. The experiences that came with the loss of colonies were traumatic for the erstwhile colonials, who carried their imperial nostalgia to the old metropolises. The social and political consequences of these longings are still unfolding in former colonizing societies. This article critically engages the materialization of lusotropical sensibilities, focusing on contemporary Portuguese decolonization as it is experienced in Lisbon’s urban landscape. I argue that cafés, restaurants, and pastry shops frequented by retornados are not only places of memory but spaces where imperial longings are ingested and internalized.

Colonial Labour Internationalized: Portugal and the Decolonization Momentum (1945–1975)

The history of the convoluted devolution of power in late colonialism can only be fully apprehended if its international and transnational dimensions are brought into the picture. Diverse modalities of internationalism shaped the disparate trajectories of colonialism and decolonization in multiple societal domains, in diverse ways. We depart from the labour question in the Portuguese late colonial empire to highlight three main inter-related aspects in order to demonstrate this argument. First, that the history of Portuguese late colonialism and decolonization was significantly moulded by international and transnational actors, institutions and networks, despite the authoritarian and nationalist nature of the metropolitan regime. Second, that the social and economic dimensions of Portuguese colonialism were a permanent feature of administrative and diplomatic ruminations regarding possible strategies of imperial resilience in a context of mounting anti-colonial pressures. Therefore, they need to be properly studied in order to advance our understanding of the trajectories of imperial disengagement. Third, that despite the increasingly hostile global order to imperial and colonial powers, noticeable in many international fora, the latter were always conceived both as channels for the expression of anti-colonial dissidence and as potentially useful instruments for those interested in advocating the continuity of imperial formations.

Portuguese tropical geography and decolonization in Africa: the case of Mozambique

Portuguese decolonization involved the formal dissolution of an authoritarian regime which had maintained through law that all its colonies – euphemistically named ‘overseas provinces’ after 1951 – were integral parts of Portuguese territory. Dissolution came after a thirteen-year war (1961–1974) with three fronts, culminating in the bloodless Carnation Revolution of April 1974. Decolonization of Portugal's colonial empire precipitated the emergence of newly independent countries, including five in Africa alone. From the late 1940s through to the early 1970s, a small group of Portuguese geographers researched their country's overseas possessions within an authoritarian political and social context and with a concern for tropical conditions. After 1974 everything changed, and most geographers who were conducting fieldwork or had been stationed overseas returned to Lisbon. This paper considers the politics and practices of Portuguese geographical scholarship as it intersected with late colonialism and decolonization in Africa, and in terms of its concern with tropical geography. It seeks to contextualize Portuguese tropical geography in Africa by outlining the development of the Lisbon School of Geography. It also examines the late development of the university geography degrees in Mozambique and Angola. In particular, the paper engages with the intellectual biographies of three geographers who were deeply involved in the geography degrees created in Lourenço Marques (presently Maputo, Mozambique), and how their lives intersected with late colonial and post-independence Mozambique. The final sections discuss how the 1974 revolution, the transitional governments, independence and later the civil wars in Angola and Mozambique impacted on Portuguese geographical research and how these developments were bound up with the abrupt end of Portuguese tropical geography.

Fuentes para la historia comparada Portugal-España: una aproximación

Con un interés eminentemente metodológico, el artículo hace un recorrido por algunas de las principales fuentes de archivo tanto españolas y portuguesas como internacionales para el estudio de los procesos de modernización y cambio político de la Península Ibérica. Comenta especialmente aquellas más útiles para las investigaciones sobre clandestinidad y oposición política, asi como las más adecuadas para abordar trabajos sobre la intervención de Francia, EEUU y otras potencias en las transiciones ibéricas y, de manera particular, en los procesos de descolonización tanto español como portugués.

Da “Débil Presença” ao Fait Accompli: A Organização das Nações Unidas e a Descolonização Portuguesa

Ao envolver-se na questão colonial portuguesa, a Organização das Nações Unidas intensificou as suas iniciativas com o início da guerra em Angola e, posteriormente, nas vésperas da descolonização. Sem negar a importância de outros fatores, pretendemos estudar o impacto das ações desenvolvidas pelas Nações Unidas na independência das colónias portuguesas. O núcleo central do artigo será constituído pelo intervalo de tempo compreendido entre a mudança de regime em Portugal com o 25 de Abril e a admissãode Angola, em dezembro de 1976, como membro da Organização. A análise reportar-se-á num primeiromomento ao interesse das Nações Unidas em participar no processo de descolonização e à recusa do seu contributo por Portugal e pelos movimentos de libertação. O segundo momento remeter-nos-á para o período em que o governo português passou a solicitar a intervenção da Organização e em que foi confrontado com os receios do secretário-geral, Kurt Waldheim, quanto a um eventual comprometimento com a situação em Timor e Angola. Subjacente ao artigo estará a tentativa de desmistificar o entendimento que tem sido propagada segundo o qual as Nações Unidas não participaram no processo de descolonizaçãoportuguês.

Os fins do tempo do fim: descolonização, negação, pertença

Very few topics mobilize both the thought -just to use a porous category of difficult definition- and the Portuguese decolonization in the mid-70s, after the Carnation Revolution. Multiple imaginations were elaborated from this event that fractured an expansion and a secular colonial theory. However, as Eduardo Lourenco fully shows ( Do colonialismo como nosso impensado , 2014) the dereliction of the Atlantic history produces a multitude of ontological and symbolic specters and critical problems for the country called to articulate a new inscription outside of the Atlantic-Europe dialectics, exclusively turned to the European mythologies and destiny. The article deals especially with the conceptual plan of the Portuguese decolonization, in particular deepening the topic in terms of conceptual history, connected to two involved categories: negation and belonging. A reflection on the temporal tangle of decolonization in particular valorizes the messianic aspect of a time of the leading to a reconsideration of the connection to an event that for some actors of the processes meant a end of the time.

Cold War Constraints: France, West Germany and Portuguese Decolonization

Cold War Constraints: France, West Germany and Portuguese Decolonization

The United States and Portuguese Decolonization

The United States and Portuguese Decolonization

The United States and Portuguese Decolonization

The United States and Portuguese Decolonization

Cold War Constraints: France, West Germany and Portuguese Decolonization

Cold War Constraints: France, West Germany and Portuguese Decolonization

Descolonização portuguesa: estado da arte, problemáticas e fontes

Descolonização portuguesa: estado da arte, problemáticas e fontes

Review: Stewart Lloyd-Jones and António Costa Pinto, eds, The Last Empire: Thirty Years of Portuguese Decolonization, Intellect Books: Bristol, UK & Portland, OR, 2003; 156 pp.; 1841501093, £19.95/$39.95 (pbk)

Review: Stewart Lloyd-Jones and António Costa Pinto, eds, The Last Empire: Thirty Years of Portuguese Decolonization, Intellect Books: Bristol, UK & Portland, OR, 2003; 156 pp.; 1841501093, £19.95/$39.95 (pbk)