SAPEGA, ellen. Consensus and Debate in Salazar's Portugal: Visual and Literary Negotiations of the National Text, 1933-1948. University Park: Penn- sylvania State UP, 2008. 184 pp.The Portuguese Estado Novo (1933-1974), an authoritarian regime headed from its inception to 1968 by the charismatic prime minister Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, strove to create a homogeneous conception of nationality grounded on economic corporatism, colonial domination, conservative social values, and close ties between the government and the Catholic Church. In order to shape the Portu- guese nation into a community of supporters, the state developed a well-oiled propaganda machine, which appropriated images and heroes from the country's long history to justify the present and to convert the disbelievers, in the apt expression of Luis Reis Torgal. Salazarist propaganda forged collective memories of a glorious national past that necessarily culminated in the Estado Novo. This teleologica! narrative, according to which the figure of Salazar often acquired mes- sianic undertones, was conveyed through a variety of state-sponsored means, including theater performances, films, exhibitions, political celebrations, popular festivities, architecture, and sculpture. Ellen Sapega's well- researched book Consen- sus and Debate in Salazar's Portugal analyzes some of the ways in which the artists and intellectuals working for the regime deployed tradition and collective memory so as to generate a consensual adherence to the the government's policies. Yet, as she points out, the discerning eye can often glimpse alternative discourses to the official ideology in the fissures of propaganda. These contending views on the national project are all the more explicit in nonpropagandistic artworks. In spite of widespread censorship, several authors and artists deviated from the official narrative of national grandeur and presented other, often bleaker interpretations of the country's present. Sapega skillfully illustrates the nuances that characterized the Portuguese artistic and literary panorama in the first fifteen years of the Estado Novo, and her study is indispensable reading for all students and scholars working on this topic.One of the strengths of Sapega's book is the fact that she touches upon a variety of literary and artistic practices. While there have been numerous works that focus on one or another aspect of artistic production under the Estado Novo, it is less common to find scholarly analyses that attempt to encompass different perspec- tives under a unifying guiding thread. Undergirding Sapega's work is the assump- tion that, in the first years of the existence of the Estado Novo, there was a sometimes explicit but often subterraneous debate among the various sectors of the country's intellectual milieu about the definition of portugalidade (Portuguese- ness). The author begins by delineating the government's version of what it means to be Portuguese through the description of some of the projects undertaken by the Secretariat of Propaganda, later rebaptized the National Secretariat for Infor- mation, Popular Culture, and Tourism. One of these was a competition that took place in 1938 to identify the most Portuguese village in Portugal. The winner would be the village that most closely approximated an idealized notion of historical purity in terms of its architecture, traditions, arts, festivities, dress, and so on. The goal of the government was to reactivate the country's connection to its historical origins, while, at the same time, emphasizing that age-old rural traditions and hierarchichal social structures could be emulated by present-day society. Rich landowners and poor peasants supposedly lived in harmony in rural Portugal, and the patriarchal rules that bound them should serve as a model for structuring the relations between the Portuguese and their leaders.Another event organized by the Secretariat of Propaganda as a means to create a cohesive, nationalistic interpretation of the country's past was the Exhibition of the Portuguese World that took place in 1940 as a part of the celebrations to mark both Portugal's eight hundredth birthday as an independent nation and the commemoration of the country's independence from Castillian rule in 1640. …
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Oct 27, 2022
Arpad Von Klimo 
Open Access
