Composing Lusophonia: Multiculturalism and National Identity in Lisbon's 1998 Musical Scene

Composing Lusophonia: Multiculturalism and National Identity in Lisbon's 1998 Musical Scene R. Timothy Sieber Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, Volume 11, Number 2, Fall 2002, pp. 163-188 (Article) Published by University of Toronto Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/dsp.2011.0031 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/388982 Access provided at 9 Jan 2020 21:55 GMT from The University Of Texas at Austin, General Libraries Diaspora 11:2 2002 Composing Lusophonia: Multiculturalism and National Identity in Lisbon’s 1998 Musical Scene R. Timothy Sieber Department of Anthropology University of Massachusetts Boston1 Following Portugal’s post-1974 transition to democracy and entry into the European Union in 1986, state reformulations of national identity increasingly stressed Portugal’s expertise in multicultural, especially international, affairs. By the 1990s, almost all discourses of national culture, history, and identity asserted Portuguese people’s historic facility in promoting dialogue and communication among the world’s cultures and nations and emphasized a history of mediation and brokerage, cross-cultural exchange and fusion, hybrid forms, and multiculturalism. Political and cultural leaders pointed to the existence of a wider lusophone or Portuguesespeaking world, stretching across Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia, as concrete evidence of past and continuing Portuguese global leadership in this domain. Lisbon’s International Exposition, Expo ’98, along with the twelve-year official celebration of the quincentennial of the Portuguese discoveries that lasted from 1988 to 2000, provided Portugal’s elites with prominent stages for promoting these new images of the nation and of its capital, Lisbon, as sophisticated brokers of transnational cultural flows. Many new experiments and celebrations of lusophone expression and new meanings for Lusophonia itself were prominently displayed in the mostly Lisbon-based artistic activities surrounding the 1998 Expo. While Lusophonia is centrally grounded in a common language and literature, the concept is commonly extended to other media of expression as well— including architecture, the plastic arts, comic art, cinema, dance, design, graphics, photography, illustration, jewelry, fashion, theater, video, and music (“Todas” 2).2 This study examines the construction of “Lusophonia” in popular music, probably the most prominent public form of lusophone expression in 1998 Lisbon. New promotions of lusophone expression are only the latest representations of Portugal’s long-standing concept of itself as a cosmopolitan, culturally open, multi-racial, and pluri-continental society (Brettel; Bastos, Commentary; de Sousa; Bastos, “(In)visible”). For over a century, such definitions of national identity gave xxxxxxxxxxxx 163 Diaspora 11:2 2002 ideological support to the Portuguese project of empire, especially in Africa. During the nearly fifty-year period of Salazarian dictatorship (1928–1974), this image offered an ideological rationale for Portugal’s attempt to retain its colonies by redefining them as overseas provinces of a “Greater Portugal.” Today’s emerging notions of Lusophonia continue to emphasize the historical stamp that the Portuguese have put on the cultures of other world regions, in a manner that attempts to respond to the nation’s postcolonial realities and its growing self-definition as a deterritorialized nation (Feldman-Bianco). There is considerable debate over how and if contemporary visions of Lusophonia differ from older imperialist ideologies and definitions of national identity. As this examination of popular music will demonstrate, both diaspora and memories of empire intermingle in complex ways in forming new identity constructs like Lusophonia in the postcolonial context. However, these new, emerging constructs echo the past and continue to place the former colonial power at the center. The Expo narrative strongly emphasized Portugal’s European credentials, evoking memories of older imperial hegemonies and affirming essentialized notions of a bounded national culture. The musical celebrations thus tended to emphasize links with former colonies (mostly in Africa), while downplaying acknowledgement of diasporic, emigrant cultural expressions. While it may be surprising to find such themes in an international, cosmopolitan event such as Expo ’98, as Hannerz has argued, cosmopolitanism does not necessarily imply multicultural competence, let alone encourage cultural hybridization, particularly when promoted by the state. Klimt and others note, in fact, that instead of promoting cultural blending, the Europeanization of Portugal and other nations has given rise to newly strengthened assertions of essentialized national, regional, and local identities. Of course, it is important to acknowledge that alternative Portuguese national narratives, especially those affirming the transnational diaspora that encompasses emigrant communities abroad, have continued strongly in other contexts. Defining what counts as “Portuguese” is no easy matter. The answers are at least as multiple and contested at the Center, in Portugal, as they are in the wider global diaspora, and often for quite similar reasons. Lusophonia Defined: Echoes of Lusotropicalism and Imperialism 164 All definitions of Lusophonia stress the encompassing transnational cultural ties that result from possession of a common language and the related expressive forms and sensibilities that link Portugal, its diasporic emigrant communities in many countries, xxxxxxxxxxxx Composing Lusophonia and its former colonies. Eduardo Lourenço refers to it as “a space of mutual confrontation among imaginaries that, sharing the same linguistic roots, observe special imperatives and constitute an affirmation of a new identity profile”3 (qtd. in Cahen 432). Almeida evokes the 1940s Sapir-Whorf linguistic hypothesis—that language molds and shapes the content of a culture’s thought—to describe conventional assumptions about Lusophonia’s effects. He notes that “language permits us to recognize networks of contact and to establish a sociable dialogue among peoples who circulate near and interact with one another.” A common language offers “avenues to conversation, cooperation and dialogue as much as we choose” (Almeida 12). In demographic and geographical terms, Alves reckons that “lusophone space” globally includes 200 million Portuguese speakers, taking both the diaspora and the ex-colonies into account, occupying an area of 10,500,000 square kilometers, on three continents, in more than twenty countries, comprising 8% of the inhabitants of the globe (Alves 23–4). The issue around which most of the discourse of Lusophonia centers today is whether it is possible to transform cultural and linguistic relations established in the imperial context into a more egalitarian cultural space for the present and the future. Today’s new emphasis on cultural fusion and interculturalism stresses the egalitarian, even benign, nature of cultural exchanges in the lusophone world. Rocha-Trindade argues, for example, that Lusophonia’s “interculturalism” implies “not only the right to share a territory, but equally the obligation for life there to follow the cultures of different groups and communities, without subordination of their ways to the majority society” (“Lusofonia” 12). Aguiar is even more clear in arguing the postcolonial credentials of Lusophonia, pointing out that the CPLP, the new seven-nation Commonwealth of Lusophone Nations (Comunidade dos Paises de Lingua Portuguesa), founded in 1996, is “an adventure among equals, without any primacy attributed to territorial or demographic disparities among partners, and even less to any positions within former colonial relationships . . .” (98–9). These writers, who have been closely aligned with the Portuguese state’s lusophone project, as well as many other intellectuals, such as Lourenço and Almeida, usually acknowledge that Lusophonia is, in this sense, more future possibility than achieved reality. The highest profile in the promotion of the project of lusophone interculturalism is held by the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Relations’ cultural affairs agency, the Instituto Camões, which fosters Portuguese language and literature programs outside the country (Maia and Massano). Its efforts are complemented by the efforts of other large, nonprofit Portuguese organizations, such as the Gulbenkian Foundation and the Luso-American Development Fund. 165 Diaspora 11:2 2002 166 Not surprisingly, Lusophonia is a deeply contested and controversial idea, though primarily on the left-wing margins inside Portugal, in the former colonies, and among foreign observers. Promoters of the concept of Lusophonia argue its importance against a field of critics who decry what they see as profound echoes of colonialism. A noted recent example of an attack on Lusophonia took place at the March 2000 International Book Fair in Paris. Portugal was still enjoying the afterglow of José Saramago’s 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature, followed by his summer 1999 visit to the international Lusophone conference in Rio de Janeiro, where he proudly proclaimed that “our Portuguese language is the most beautiful in the world” (qtd. in Tabucchi 18). Saramago called for a stronger common lusophone cultural identity among all Portuguese-speaking peoples around the globe. When the 2000 Paris book fair arrived, the celebration of Lusophonia continued, as twenty major Portuguese language writers were invited to appear and receive recognition from the Portuguese government and publishing industry for their achievements. The event spawned an angry public exchange in a Le Monde article, reported widely in Portugal. One of the invitees, Antonio Tabucchi of Italy, translator of twentieth-century, Portuguese poetic great Fernando Pessoa and author of the Portuguese-language novel Requiem, rejected his invitation and denounced the concept of Lusophonia. Tabucchi admitted that he himself is, “in a certain manner, a lusophone” (18) but argued that the idea of Lusophonia, “founded on the idea of the language as patria or as a national flag, seen as the coagulant of the idea of nation,” represents a form of “neo-colonialism” that merits “serious reflection,” in this present “epoch of the ferocious return of racism and xenophobia to Europe” (Tabucchi 18). “European languages,” he further reminded his readers, “were not disseminated through nice sonnets, but on the points of swords” (19). He cautioned that during the Salazarist era, which ended only in 1974, celebration of such linguistic purity carried deeply xenophobic undertones. Others have made even more pointed critiques of Lusophonia, seeing it as a new incarnation of Brazilian Gilberto Freyre’s lusotropicalist argument, so thoroughly appropriated by Salazar in the final defense of Portugal’s empire, from the 1950s through the 1970s. Lusotropicalism argued the supposed non-racist, culturally open, even harmonious nature of Portuguese colonialism and maintained that Portugal’s more enlightened variety of colonialism promoted unique, racially egalitarian, creole forms, seeding Portuguese culture peacefully through its tropical colonies (Cunha 463). Observers like Jochen Oppenheimer recognize elements of such a lusotropicalist discourse in today’s Lusophonia. He writes, “[t]he Lusotropicalist myth continues in the hybrid form of Lusophonia xxxxxxxxxxxx Composing Lusophonia and the idea of an intrinsic universalism of Portuguese culture” (Oppenheimer 473). Teotónio de Souza also casts Lusophonia as a new lusotropicalism. “Nowadays,” he asserts, “we have the language of ‘lusophonia,’ ‘lusotopia’ and other variants, which Portugal seeks to exploit for drawing benefits from what is presented as virtues of the Portuguese colonial past in Asia, Africa, and Brazil” (de Souza 383). Finally, Margarido points to Lusophonia’s failure to acknowledge or resolve older colonial hierarchies and racist legacies. He believes that accepting the idea of Lusophonia carries a high price for former colonials, since it means concealing the painful history of empire: The current lusophone discourse limits itself to trying to dissimulate, but not eliminate, the brutal traces of the past. It tries in fact to recuperate at least a fraction of the ancient Portuguese hegemony, in a manner maintaining colonial domination, although having renounced the vehemence or the violence of any colonial discourse. The principle would be this— whoever, not being Portuguese, uses the Portuguese language is obligated to exalt the achievements of the Portuguese, renouncing any historical criticisms (76, 77–8). Portuguese versus Lusophone Images My own stance as an American in Lisbon in 1998, coming from a country in which national culture is openly contested and deeply aware of itself as multicultural and multivocal, made me aware of a keen paradox in Portugal. Portuguese anthropology, as Cristiana Bastos pointed out so well, has been documenting the heterogeneity of the Portuguese people since the 1980s and contesting the older nationalist idea of the Portuguese as one homogeneous ethnolinguistic unit (Commentary). In 1998, on the other hand, amidst all the seeming representation of multicultural, international, including lusophone, cultural expression in the Lisbon festivities, Portuguese culture itself was implicitly presented as homogeneous, traditional, fairly static, fundamentally European, and white—in sum, sharply distinct from wider foreign expressions, including the lusophone forms the Portuguese themselves supposedly spawned. In general, within Portugal there continues to be a strong aversion to multicultural definitions of Portuguese national culture that cast it as a creole or hybrid product. Due to the perceived divisive nature of such definitions, many Portuguese, including intellectuals, continue to emphasize how much the country constitutes a single ethno-linguistic unit (e.g., Monteiro and Pinto). Few seem to recognize or to question how African, Asian, and Latin American cultures have changed or contributed to the development xxxxxxxxxxxx 167 Diaspora 11:2 2002 168 of Portuguese culture itself. Instead, fairly essentialist assumptions of a centuries-old, unchanging, homogeneous Portuguese culture are still quite prevalent.4 Perhaps such notions are even receiving more promotion today, as Portuguese elites defend Portuguese language and culture against dilution and suppression from other national forms gaining hegemony in the new Europe. Where so much political and legal sovereignty is being surrendered to the European Union, it is perhaps not surprising that the state is searching for ways of asserting and preserving national autonomy. The end result is that even though Portuguese culture is understood to have given rise to lusophone fusions elsewhere in the world, culture “at home” is not defined as being lusophone. This distinction, as we will see, also structures the oppositional definitions of “Portuguese” and “lusophone” musics. How, then, do such seemingly essentialist and even narrowly nationalist notions complement the quite prevalent 1998 assertions about Portugal’s historical participation in intercultural exchanges? How can these two different, seemingly contradictory conceptions coexist? As we will see, those promoting the discourse of Lusophonia—at least with regard to music—emphasize cross-fertilization and hybridization between Portuguese and wider, especially African, musical elements; but they do so in a hierarchical manner that defines Portuguese music as a universal agent, influencing other musics, but not being influenced by them in turn. This discourse works for so many in contemporary Portugal because it mimics so well more traditional imperialist thinking, though transposed from the political and economic domain to a seemingly more independent sphere of cultural production. To probe the constructed definitions of musical Lusophonia, I will examine the presence of these themes and tensions within the cultural domain of musical performances and productions in Lisbon during the summer of 1998. The Portuguese state’s enormous Expo project, of course, set the musical tone for most of what happened in Lisbon during that year. Virtually all other public entities selfcoordinated their musical initiatives to mimic or complement Expo’s agendas, though they sometimes departed from state-sponsored Expo narratives in revealing ways. The following considerations of a range of divergent musical events, each with different purposes and audiences, allow for a more careful delineation of the varying ways that memories of empire, the transnational diaspora, and class relations inside Portugal were handled and debated. It will become clear that in the musical sphere, as in others, definitions of Portugueseness are multiple and always contested. The analysis will focus on five particular musical performance or production events, chosen to include all the most visible, publicly heralded events within the Lisbon scene that addressed musical xxxxxxxxxxxx Composing Lusophonia Lusophonia. They include the nation’s two most extensive musical performance programs, Expo ’98 and the City of Lisbon’s June Festival of Lisbon; a widely promoted free public concert, entitled Music from Near and Far; and the release of the album, Onda Sonora: Red Hot + Lisbon. I will also briefly examine the case of the Orquestra Sons da Lusofonia (“Lusophone Sounds Orchestra”), which offers a divergent, alternative reading of musical Lusophonia. Why Music? Music was stunningly visible, and of course audible, during the 1998 summer celebrations. At the five-month Expo alone, 4,877 mostly musical spectacles took place (Parque Expo, Relatório). Outside Expo, many hundreds more public performances occurred during this time frame, most free to the public, especially during the June Festival of Lisbon. Music was, during this period, unquestionably the most popular and ubiquitous type of public cultural production. In an environment where cultural exchange, globalism, and internationalism are being promoted, the careful selection of musical offerings expressed and naturalized cross-cultural relations, essences, categories, and hierarchies. As anthropologist Frederick Erickson notes, music is par excellence a “symbol of affiliation marking the political and psychological boundaries between the familiar and the unfamiliar—between ‘us’ and ‘them’ [and music] sketches lines of affiliation, identity, and boundaries within and between communities” (20–1). Music is also a non-representational art and its sensual multimodality makes it a powerfully accessible form of expression. Public musical performance, especially, has both auditory and visual dimensions, is instantaneously communicable, and is the art form most suitable for immediate collective consumption at large public gatherings. For all these reasons, there was more public and private patronage of music than of any other art form during Lisbon’s intensely collective, ephemeral summer of 1998, as more than ten million people flooded the city to enjoy its festive atmosphere. Expo ’98 Expo’s musical program set the dominant tone for what in 1998 was considered correct musical expression with respect to definitions of “lusophone.” Our attention here is on the categories and lines of difference constructed through the musical line-up as well as the significant patterns of inclusion and exclusion created by the world’s fair’s program. Most evident in Expo’s musical program was an essentialist and hierarchical framing of “Portuguese music” in xxxxxxxxxxxx 169 Diaspora 11:2 2002 170 relation to wider “lusophone music”: these two types of music were considered as completely separate categories. Lusophone music encompassed music from the former colonies, but not Portuguese forms themselves. Music from transnational emigrant communities, for reasons that will be explained below, was also not incorporated into this category. Portuguese music on the Expo program, in its own turn, included varieties produced within Portugal, typically continental and typically European. These musical categorizations became clearly visible in the physical separations between lines of programming. Expo’s ten performance venues for music were segregated by type of music (Parque Expo, Espectáculos): Stage One was reserved for fado, generally presented as the most traditional form of Portuguese music;5 Stage Two was for jazz at night and children’s music during the day; Stage Three specifically featured lusophone music; Stage Four was for other world music; and Stage Six was for pop music, including alternative and hip-hop, most of it Portuguese. Big-name, modern recording stars from Portugal and other parts of the world, as well as a few star performers from former colonies, such as Brazil’s Caetano Veloso or Cape Verde’s Cesaria Evora, performed in the largest venue, the SONY theater, which held fifteen thousand people. In general, however, lusophone music, including such groups as Willy and An’bal from Mozambique, Galo Preto from Brazil, and Irmaos Kafala from Angola, was confined to Stage Three. All the other stages were used as spillover spaces or for dance performances. It is interesting to note that, despite all the publicity about the prominence of lusophone music and cultural events at the fair, music from the former colonies had a marginal presence when compared to music that was presented as quintessentially Portuguese. Taking Expo’s first month as a sample, it is easy to see that Portuguese music dominated: 110 Portuguese groups performed, but fewer than a third as many acts (35) represented the former colonies, and 24 of these were from Brazil—leaving only 11 acts from all other lusophone nations, including the five PALOPs (Paises Africanos da Lingua Oficial Portuguesa [“African Countries with Portuguese as Official Language”]).6 This categorization of music, incidentally, was also maintained at the music store at the fair’s Portuguese Pavilion, where a supposedly complete collection of Portuguese music was available for purchase: this collection included fado, música popular portuguesa, and música folclorica from the continent and the islands (Azores and Madeira) and classical music either composed or performed by Portuguese artists—but not Lusophone music from the ex-colonies. In other music stores, Portuguese music typically has its own section as well, includes the same varieties, and is kept distinct from “Brazilian” and “African PALOP” Music. The construcxxxxxxxxxxxx Composing Lusophonia tion of these lusophone musics as culturally and geographically “Other” is further exaggerated by concealing the European links of many well-known lusophone artists and maintaining the fiction that their music is from elsewhere. For example, lusophone African artists who have long been resident and recording in Europe, such as Boy Ge Mendes and Bonga of Paris and Waldemar Bastos of Brussels, are placed under categories of African music from Cape Verde or Angola. This even happens with immigrant artists long resident in Portugal, such as Cape Verdean singer and bandleader Tito Paris, whose musical recordings, including a live concert at Club B Leza in Lisbon, where he has played weekly for some years, are typically placed in the PALOP African section, under Cape Verde. At Expo ’98, Portuguese music was constituted as strictly white: fado and popular Portuguese music; pop music; including rock, alternative, and hip-hop forms; as well as the sophisticated urban folk form referred to as música popular portuguesa. The more sophisticated, commercialized forms of distinctively Portuguese popular music, mostly twentieth-century, urban varieties favored by the younger generations of the middle and upper classes, such as rock, dance, fado, and the contemporary folk-song genre, música popular portuguesa, were well represented in the official Expo program. The objectives of the political, economic, and cultural elites who planned Expo—to dramatize Portugal’s modernity, Europeanness, and scientific and technical prowess, and to refashion the nation for a postcolonial and neoliberal era—were clearly reflected in the fair’s musical lineup. Other types of music, more favored by working-class people, emigrant communities in countries outside of Portugal, or those with strong ties to rural regions or peasant culture, tended to be marginalized or excluded altogether from the Expo program, even if some of them, such as folkloric music, were offered for sale in the Portuguese Pavilion’s bookstore.7 In general, Expo program and exhibit offerings did little to celebrate the cultures of these groups or to make them feel welcome at the event (Sieber, Remembering).The high costs of entrance also kept many people away, and members of local immigrant communities, especially from Africa, were largely excluded, except as unskilled workers in construction or cleaning at the fair. Folkloric music and dancing is quite alive in Portugal, especially in the urban areas, where revivalist folk troupes regularly perform. More than one thousand such groups are estimated to exist nationwide (Holton, interview). Except for rare appearances, such as on the Day of Portugal on June 10th, folkloric music and dancing was, however, largely excluded from the Expo program, as it is associated for many with images of Portuguese backwardness and countered Expo’s effort to constitute Portugal in modern terms (Holton, xxxxxxxxxxxx 171 Diaspora 11:2 2002 172 “Dressing”; Klimt). Lisbon’s ranchos folcloricos (“revivalist folkdance troupes”) were only added to the Expo program late in the summer, in response to consistent pressure and popular demand. The Lisbon-based, popular, working-class marchas populares were also allowed to perform within Expo venues only after a great deal of public pressure and extensive negotiations with Expo officials, who were extremely resistant to incorporating this musical form into the official agenda. Although they finally acquired permission to perform, most of these groups were allocated very peripheral performance spaces, in Expo’s public areas rather than on the formal stages where the more official and prestigious arts program occurred; their appearances were generally not advertised as part of the formal schedule; nor were the performances interpreted for non-Portuguese fair-goers. As Brazilian anthropologist Bela Feldman-Bianco has explained, before its embrace of European integration in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Portuguese state’s other major post-Salazarian national narrative aimed to incorporate emigrant communities, especially those in southern Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, North America, and northern Europe, into definitions of the Portuguese nation. Indeed, one-third of the people with Portuguese citizenship live outside the country’s borders, and some estimate that migrant remittances constitute up to 30% of Portugal’s national income (Baganha). This transnational narrative continues to be important inside Portugal and even more so in the diaspora. In Expo’s programming, however, Portugal’s overseas emigrant communities were scarcely acknowledged. The thousands of immigrant associations abroad, and emigration history itself, were dealt with only in one, marginally located, tiny pavilion in the nautical display area, and on a shipboard exhibit on the adjacent frigate Dom Fernando II e Glória. Reminding visitors of the millions of emigrants abroad, the need until recently for labor out-migration, and Portugal’s chronic reliance on remittances would have undermined the modern, European image Expo organizers sought to portray (Sieber, Remembering). The exclusion of emigrant music from Expo venues follows class lines. The musical genres popular in emigrant communities outside of Portugal largely overlap with village, small town, and workingclass tastes inside Portugal itself. These encompass música popular regional, including música folclorica; música ligeira, light, lyrical music, sometimes called música romántica; and another kind of popular, polka-type dance music, usually termed música pimba. These latter musics are sometimes referred to by the middle and upper classes in Portugal as música foleira (“music in bad taste”). A representative example of música ligeira would be the singer Marco Paulo, who, with his band and chorus, has performed for xxxxxxxxxxxx Composing Lusophonia decades, both inside Portugal and in emigrant communities abroad. Immensely popular, his romantic music treats traditional, often conservative, themes of love, religious faith, marriage, commitment to family, and loss, especially through the emigration process. Paulo has sold three-and-one-half million recordings, including fifty-seven gold and platinum (Marco Paulo Espectáculos), but despite his popularity, he and other, similar singers, such as Fernando Santana and Paulo Ribeiro, were not invited to Expo. The only immigrant groups or individuals included in the Portuguese category, interestingly, were a few, second-generation, Portuguese-born singers of African descent, mostly hip-hop artists, most prominent among them, Black Company and General D. They are anomalies, but because they are Portuguese-born and sing in contemporary, northern, rather than African styles, they are considered not lusophone but Portuguese. Festas de Lisboa The Festas of Lisbon echo some of Expo’s main themes, especially the opposition between Portuguese and lusophone musics and the hierarchical relationship between Europe and Africa. The 1998 festival, however, was also different in very important ways: it was designed for the Portuguese themselves, especially Lisbonites, and decidedly not for tourists. It was, therefore, much more inclusive in the types of music it promoted and the types of local audiences it sought to include. The vision of Lisbon and Portugal promoted by the festival was much broader and incorporated much more crossclass diversity than that featured at Expo. An obvious point of contrast was that the controversially high cost of entry made Expo too expensive to attend for most lower income Portuguese, whereas the Lisbon festival was completely free to the public. The promoters also offered a vision of Europe that stressed Portugal’s regional, Mediterranean credentials rather than its ties to the industrial centers of the north. The upscale image of Portugal and Lisbon promoted to the world at Expo was quite different from the open and locally oriented agenda of the Lisbon festival. The following exploration of this popular Lisbon event helps throw Expo’s relative elitism and narratives of modernity into greater relief. The Festas of Lisbon are a relatively long tradition in Lisbon, with some elements dating to the 1930s. They occur each June, around the time of the city’s popular saints’ days, especially St. Anthony’s on June 13th, and usually last for two to four weeks, depending on neighborhood and year. Programs involve a series of free, nightly musical performances, in multiple locations in the city, many of them with arraiais populares (“public festivals”) that intertwine eating, drinking, and dancing. Publicity for the 1998 festival, xxxxxxxxxxxx 173 Diaspora 11:2 2002 issued only in Portuguese and through local media, decidedly ignored foreign visitors. This was very noticeable at a time when the entire city, in every other context, it seemed, was marketing itself and its offerings to foreign visitors. Despite its more inclusive, popular character, the Festas 1998 musical program reinforced Expo’s theme of cultural encounters between Lisbon and the rest of the world. As the chief festival planner explained, This is all linked to the collectivities and the cultures of contact, important in the formation of Portuguese culture and with the history of Lisbon, too. This confluence of cultures also exists in Lisbon, and this stage celebrates these contacts–with Spain, with Africa, Asia, and even Latin America. We included more multiculturalism this year. We tried to present something expressing the diverse cultures and expressions that Lisbon has. In this year that marks the 500 years of Vasco da Gama, a point of fundamental reference is to call attention to cultures that were present in the formation of the country and the city. Lisbon was a fundamental platform for these contacts, and developed as a result of them. (Louro) 174 In the program brochure, the city’s director of urban rehabilitation echoed the festival director’s ideas: “The programming celebrates the cultural roots of Lisbon and its people, this Lisbon that was a center of adventures and misfortunes, a city Mediterranean and Atlantic, of fairs of other flavors, and distant sounds, and popular cultures that crossed here, and still do” (Festas de Lisboa 3). The organization of the festival’s performances assigned the music to different venues, in more or less the same hierarchical manner as that of Expo. The largest stage and performance space was at the expansive Praça do Comercio in the Baixa, or old downtown area. At this site, popular Portuguese pop music acts, including big names like Ala dos Namarados and Rui Veloso, were the main and most featured performers. The smaller Campo das Cebolas plaza was the site for more working-class forms of Portuguese music, especially música romántica, música pimba, and música popular regional, including revivalist, peasant, and folkloric music and dancing, mostly presented by ranchos folcloricos connected to regional associations resident in Lisbon. Fado was also offered there on Sunday evenings. This stage and its clientele constituted the only real working-class location of the various stages and included types of music and people conspicuously absent from Expo. Another stage, at the Largo do Chafariz de Dentro in Alfama, mimicked a more intimate, bourgeois club atmosphere, for small-ensemble performances of jazz, classical, cabaret, and some fado. Finally, a xxxxxxxxxxxx Composing Lusophonia fourth stage, located at the Largo do Terreiro do Trigo, was devoted to what was variously called “roots music” or “world music,” which included both lusophone and broader world music from fifteen countries from different continents. Program publicity extravagantly claimed not only that the music of Portugal’s ex-colonies was influenced by contact with Portuguese culture, but that even other “southern” music, such as that from Latin America outside of Brazil, was in some manner inspired by the Portuguese discoveries, although exactly how was left vague. As at the Expo venues, lusophone musics from the former colonies were not especially prominent here, making up less than half of the Festas “world” music program. Music from Near and Far The manner in which postcolonial musics are essentialized and hierarchized within Portugal was also evident in a June performance sponsored by the Macao-based, charitable, arts-oriented foundation, the Fundação de Oriente celebrating its tenth anniversary at Lisbon’s Teatro da Dona Maria, the national theater. A very unusual feature of this widely publicized event was its location. It was held in the most prestigious theater in Lisbon, if not in all of Portugal, but surprisingly enough, especially given the venue, entry was completely free. It was a rare occasion for the public to enter a usually quite exclusive cultural site to witness what was billed as an especially important, unique musical event. Although a private production of a non-profit organization, this concert also complemented the broad theme of cultural exchange promoted by Expo and the city’s June festivals. Designed as an experience in lusophone music, the concert was entitled “Music from Near and Far” and was advertised as a “fusion of musics and styles of the West and the East” (Fundação). Ties between Portugal and “the East,” especially the former colonies in Macao, Indian Goa, and East Timor, were featured, since the sponsoring organization was based in Macao. Contrary to the overt frame of cultural encounter, the concert displayed no real musical fusion. The program primarily featured a type of Portuguese urban folk music, música popular portuguesa, and three of this music’s most popular living singers, the brothers Vitorino and Janita Salomé and Rui Veloso dominated the program, sang many of their own Portuguese songs, and were the clear stars of the show. At one point in the middle of the concert, a band of Chinese musicians from Macao, the Gheong Hong de Macau ensemble, filed onto the stage, sat in formation, and along with the Portuguese back-up band, accompanied one of Rui Veloso’s songs on their Chinese-style instruments. The Macanese orchestra then xxxxxxxxxxxx 175 Diaspora 11:2 2002 played two Asian-style numbers by themselves, unaccompanied by the Portuguese band members and singers who were still on the stage. During the final portion of the concert, a dance troupe of Hindu dancers, the Nr’it Yagram Dance Ensemble, apparently from Goa, performed two dances that enacted dramatic narratives. No explanation accompanied these performances. Indeed, not one of the obviously unknown foreign performers or groups was ever introduced to the audience and no program was distributed with any information that might help the audience understand the unfamiliar forms of dance and music. The only acknowledgement of either of the visiting groups occurred when Vitorino came across the stage at the end of the concert, laid his hand on the shoulder of the concertmaster of the Macanese orchestra, and said, “Thank you for accompanying us tonight.” While short in duration compared to the more extensive festivals already considered, this single concert displays, in almost crystallized form, the key themes that characterize relations between Portuguese and wider lusophone music: they are maintained as sharply separate, hierarchized musics; the non-European lusophone musics are exoticized and essentialized; lusophone musics are viewed as supportive and somehow derivative of Portuguese forms; and Portuguese forms never reference or emphasize any of their own borrowings from non-Portuguese. The obviously patronizing treatment of the foreign musics and performers cast the promise of “fusion” into rather telling ironic relief. Onda Sonora: Red Hot + Lisbon 176 The release of the multicultural Onda Sonora: Red Hot + Lisbon AIDS benefit album was another key lusophone musical moment during the time of Expo. The album’s release on 18 May 1998 was timed to coincide with the opening of Expo, and Expo itself sponsored a special “reunion” concert of album artists in July. Red Hot + Lisbon was the major, most highly publicized musical recording associated with Expo ’98. While this was a privately organized, international initiative and far from a Portuguese state project, the album’s production, content, and promotion all illustrate the extent to which the state project and the wider hegemonic lusophone narrative it promulgated shaped a wide range of other public and private initiatives. In this case, musical promoters and entrepreneurs dovetailed their effort with Expo, echoing and even extending the fair’s discourse of lusophone fusion between Portugal and its former colonies. The Red Hot + Lisbon album was the eleventh in an international series of benefit albums, produced by the New York Citybased Red Hot organization, assembled to raise funds for AIDS xxxxxxxxxxxx Composing Lusophonia relief. Red Hot + Lisbon celebrated Lisbon as a cauldron of interaction and fusion for Lusophone musics. The CD liner notes present the album as a “musical journey of reverse colonization; riding the sound waves back from Lisbon across space and time to trace and enjoy the unexpected fruits of the rough marriage of the Portuguese with the African, American and Asian cultures they encountered and transformed . . . [and to offer a] travelogue of musical souvenirs tracing the Portuguese legacy from Fado to Samba to Morna” (Red Hot Organization). Producers Andres Levin, a Venezuelan, living in New York City and Brazil, and a LusoAmerican, Brian Becó Dranoff, also living in New York City and Brazil, wrote on the project’s Web site, “the idea was to bring together all the Portuguese cultures of the world, and make one record that unified, through rhythm and melody and songs, the way Portuguese culture was spread out all over the world” (Onda Sonora). The music on the album is quite varied: it is almost entirely pop, with extensive hip-hop and rock elements. Traditional music is limited to a few, fado-inspired pieces. While Portuguese pop artists such as Madredeus, Paulo Bragança, Delfins, Felipa Pais, and General D make up about a third of the artists on the album, most of the rest of the performers are Brazilian, including Caetano Veloso, Marisa Monte, and Carlinhos Brown, or African, such as Sadjo Djola Kolate, Filipe Mukenga, and Bonga. A few North American and British stars, like KD Lang and David Byrne, are also featured, as is the New York–based, African-American techno artist, DJ Spooky. As with Expo, music of emigrant communities in the diaspora was excluded, in favor of music from the tropical excolonies. Ironically, some types of luso-diasporic ties were in fact highlighted in the album, but they were not the sort of transnational identities promoted by the Portuguese state in the traditional emigrant communities abroad. Anglo-Brazilian fusions and musical hybridities were quite prominent in the production, bypassing Lisbon altogether, through the presence of many artists, as well as the album’s producers, whose professional networks and musical roots connected Brazil with either New York or London. The broad musical sweep of the album also drew in some local Lisbon musicians with roots in immigrant, ex-colonial cultures, such as the Cape Verdean singer Lura and the resident musical group at Lisbon’s House of Goa, Ekvat. As usual, reviewers did not recognize these musicians as Portuguese. The agenda of the album was to place together, in each musical number, musicians who normally work in different genres or geographic locations and who had, prior to the recording, never collaborated with one another. Angolan singer Bonga, for example, performed Mulemba Xangóla with the accompaniment of Brazil’s xxxxxxxxxxxx 177 Diaspora 11:2 2002 178 Marisa Monte and Carlinhos Brown. Sem Voçe (“Without You”) was performed by Brazilian songwriter, musician, and poet Arnaldo Antunes; Arto Lindsay, the New York–based American progressive rock artist, who grew up partly in Brazil; and Brazilian rock artist Davi Moraes. The album was intended to produce unique, one-time, experimental musical collaborations, unlikely to ever be repeated, rather than any real, ongoing new developments that would sustain themselves in any particular local Portuguese contexts, whether in Lisbon or elsewhere. It is true that the album featured forty artists, from eleven countries, singing in seven different languages, and resulted in some genuinely original musical and cultural crossovers. On the other hand, only two of the nineteen numbers were actually recorded in Lisbon. Moreover, while all the musical pieces involved collaborations, virtually all of them were studio-created products— that is to say, individual artists were recorded in different cities in different countries and then later had their tracks mixed musically, usually in yet a third location, generally New York City or Rio de Janeiro. Many of the artists had never seen one another face-toface. In fact, one bit of publicity claimed, as a special feature of the album, that some of the artists had actually met and conversed with one another in person, even if they had never actually played together! The album featured multisited mixes and remixes. Portuguese General D’s and Brazilian Funk N’Lata’s hip-hop/samba mix, for example, was put together in New York at Kampo Studios, but from musical components by Funk N’Lata that were recorded at AR Studios in Rio de Janeiro and by General D, at Namouche Studios, Lisbon. In fact, out of the eighteen tracks on the album where recording information is given, sixteen were artificial syntheses of this sort, only two were mixed in Lisbon, and only half had music that was recorded by musicians physically present in Lisbon itself. Seven of the eighteen tracks, more than a third, included no music or artists at all from Portugal. Although much attention is given to Lisbon as a cauldron of world music, the lusophone fusions supposedly evident on this album appear to be mostly studio-created, artificial constructs that have little actual presence in the Portuguese capital. Lisbon, here, is more an imaginary than a physical or social place.8 As one might expect, many Lisbon music critics derided the album for overplaying the actual forms of multicultural and musical fusion taking place in Lisbon and perhaps even globally in the lusophone world. Its release resulted in some sarcastic criticism in Portugal, where many noted how few of the artists on the album were Portuguese: “More Lusophone than Portuguese” read the newspaper O Público’s headline over its CD review (Catalão). João Lisboa, of the Expresso artes supplement, wrote, Composing Lusophonia Onda Sonora/Red Hot + Lisbon is founded in a great project of wishful thinking—imagining Lisbon as a multicultural and cosmopolitan European capital, a magnet for world musicians (like Paris or London are, for example) where from the African ex-colonies to Brazil and even Asia an immense cultural stew is boiling, and the roots of the world’s diverse traditions cross and combine in a festive celebration of differences and identities. It’s clear that we don’t have to reflect much to see that this is pretty far from the truth, and that this album has in fact little to do with the capital and its peripheral countries as they really exist. Whatever the complex interplay might be among cultural, linguistic, and musical influences that have been crosscutting the lusophone world for some centuries, it seems clear that a recognized, self-conscious fusion of lusophone vernaculars has not yet evolved. Musics, as well as culture more widely, are still disquieted by colonial legacies. The Red Hot + Lisbon album provides little evidence of the sort of long-term, densely interactive, multiple, hybridized musical borrowings and creolization of black vernacular expressions that Gilroy, for example, discerns in a “Black Atlantic” and designates as true “diaspora culture.” Such an authentic creole or hybrid tradition would require more felt ownership, in Portugal itself, of African and other lusophone music as forms of Portuguese expression and more acknowledgement of Portuguese culture itself as a creole product, at least partly shaped by a wider lusophone world. Grassroots artistic creativity, rather than New York City, studio-created remixes, would then be more likely to produce and extend genuine and new lusophone cross-fertilizations. Ironically, the emerging vernacular musical scene in Lisbon itself—in pop music, jazz, and especially immigrant musics, where so much lusophone fusion really occurs—was mostly ignored in the official 1998 musical celebrations.9 We will turn our attention next to one such ignored musical group. Discordant Notes: Alternative Phrasings of Lusophonia None of these official musical experiments, it seems, promoted genuinely new lusophone fusions, except for collecting different Portuguese and Portuguese-linked musicians and musical repertoires as separate elements in the same festival, on the same stage or album, or even in the same musical cut. Lusophonia, at least as it was musically expressed during Lisbon’s 1998 festivities, maintained older, essentialist, and hierarchical framings of Portuguese cultural expression in relation to that of the former colonies. Despite the official rhetoric about exchanges, encounters, and crossfertilizations, the celebrations neither recognized nor celebrated xxxxxxxxxxxx 179 Diaspora 11:2 2002 180 much musical hybridity or fusion. In these enactments of musical Lusophonia, there do indeed seem to be certain parallels with older lusotropicalist ideas that celebrated miscegenation and hybridity in the colonies, while preserving essentialist and racialized conceptions of Portuguese “at home,” as pure, superior, and homogeneous. The discourse of Lusophonia, at least as it applies to music, echoes these conceptions and is not designed to recognize and celebrate the genuine complex fusions that have emerged, both inside and outside of Portugal. Instead it obscures them through the construction, separation, and ranking of musical types. In this sense, today’s common expressions of Lusophonia, especially those promoted by the state, represent at best a very superficial postcolonial reconstruction of older imperialist ideologies.10 There was, however, a discordant note in lusophone musical expression during the late 1990s. Interestingly, this musical expression received no official imprimatur, patronage, or subsidies from Expo, from the City of Lisbon’s Festas de Lisboa, or from any powerful institution or foundation involved in promoting the musical events discussed previously. I refer to the unusual, Lisbon-based Orquestra Sons da Lusofonia, directed by composer, jazz artist, and saxophonist Carlos Martins (see Martins and Orquestra). The orchestra is made up of 24 musicians from Angola, Portugal, Cape Verde, São Tome, Guinea-Bissau, and Brazil, and has enjoyed the collaboration of such well-known performers as Portugal’s Rui Veloso, Barnardo Sassetti, and Felipa Pais, Cape Verde’s Dany Silva, and Angola’s Filipe Mukenga. In an interview, Martins explained that Sons da Lusofonia is the only orchestra in Portugal and, indeed, in all of Europe that mixes musicians from Europe and Africa. Reflecting on Lisbon’s 1998 musical offerings, he criticized the superficiality of their lusophone vision: “What they are giving is really dispensing with Lusophonia. Show a little music of Cape Verde, a little dance of Goa, a little food in a cafe. This is the image of Lusophonia they are giving, but to be truthful, it’s not enough” (Interview). The orchestra’s own thoughtful and forward-looking vision of musical Lusophonia goes well beyond the conventional displays that characterized most musical offerings in 1998. In Orquestra Sons da Lusofonia both artists and musical elements combine and influence one another in more flexible, non-hierarchical ways. Not surprisingly, a more collaborative style of musical composition and arranging between Africans and Europeans also produces new, genuine musical hybrids, combining musical forms on the same stage, in the same ensemble, in the same composition. Martins explained that his orchestra builds each musical number through intensive collaboration among all the musicians under his direction. The creative process usually starts with traditional pieces, such as a Cape Verdean morna, a fado, or a Mozambiquan xxxxxxxxxxxx Composing Lusophonia lullaby. The reach of Lusophonia here, once again, excludes music from the emigrant diaspora, in favor of the former, especially African, colonies. Specifically Portuguese musical elements are mostly drawn from jazz, urban folk music, and fado, but not from regional folkloric musics. Bringing these musical elements together, the orchestra creates and performs entirely new compositions, with original arrangements and instrumentation and new general musical elaboration, mixing, for example, rhythmic schemes or instrumentation from one country with a melody from another. Each piece requires many hours of dialogue, exchange, experimentation, and collaboration among the musicians, in order to arrive at a final arrangement that satisfies everyone’s sense of musical integrity. As Martins elucidated, “What we are doing is different—trying to find a common thread to a certain kind of music, and then to invent something new starting from something traditional” (Interview). Most of the resulting pieces are full-bodied—melodic instruments, strong on percussion, horns, and keyboard, drawing on blues jazz and folk styles, most with African or Brazilian rhythmic schemes. Many carry vocals, normally solo voices, usually African or Brazilian, with both Portuguese and African lyrics. Lines from Martins’ jazz-inflected tenor saxophone are often foregrounded, as well. Overall, the music is a fairly even mix of African, Brazilian, and European styles. In breaking clearly with past colonialist or lusotropicalist ideologies and cultural hierarchies, the orchestra viewed lusophone musical space as yet undefined, mostly a matter for new creation and for the future. In liner notes on the orchestra’s CD, also released in 1998, Martins writes that the orchestra was attempting to “fill an empty space in the music of Portugal, Africa and Brazil.” Far from being cynical about the creative potential of lusophone collaborations, Martins believes that these new forms represent a contemporary discovery for the musicians and listeners, one that contains a “vision of the future we hope for, contributing to the consolidation of the notion of lusophone identity in the breast of the Lusophone Commonwealth of Nations” (Martins, Sobre). Martins’ and the orchestra’s vision is striking for its rare commitment to democratic, egalitarian lusophone musical fusion. Conclusions Before offering concluding observations on the place of music in contemporary formulations of national identity in Portugal, it is important to place Lisbon’s 1998 lusophone advocacy, in music as in other arenas, within a broader, global perspective. As Isabel Cunha has noted, the prolongation of a lusotropicalist discourse in contemporary Portugal can be seen as an attempt to preserve the xxxxxxxxxxxx 181 Diaspora 11:2 2002 182 nation’s sense of identity and place in history, in the face of European integration and the threat it poses to Portuguese culture and the Portuguese language (464). Everywhere the Portuguese might look globally, their former empire and remaining lusophone space appears under attack. Three of their former West African colonies, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and São Tome e Príncipe, are surrounded by francophone countries and have already become part of the Francophonie, the official commonwealth of French-speaking nations. In Southern Africa, Mozambique, as well—completely surrounded by anglophone countries—became part of the British Commonwealth of Nations in 1996. In the Americas, both English and Spanish are making serious inroads in Brazil. Even the CPLP, the Lusophone Commonwealth founded in 1996, is relatively new. With its meager seven members, it is dwarfed by the Francophonie (founded in 1970, with fifty-two member states and governments) and by the British Commonwealth (founded in 1976, with fifty-one member countries). Portugal’s leaders have long hoped to gain some advantage within European Union politics via Portugal’s special link with its former African colonies, the PALOPs. While in the imperial past, Portugal’s commitment to an Atlantic, mostly African, nationbuilding project led it to turn its back on Europe, in the postcolonial era, the nation’s leaders see Portugal’s new European project as consistent with a retained, even if revised, African one. As Alves has noted, “With respect to external relations, the Portuguese Minister of Foreign Affairs observed that Portugal is worth more when it presents itself to the European Union along with the full set (cúmplicidade) of Portuguese-speaking countries, and the other six lusophone countries gain increased standing as well” (Alves 31; see also Gama).11 The importance of the PALOPs as political allies to the Portuguese state is shown by the fact that fully 95% of all Portuguese bilateral foreign aid is directed to them, and most interestingly, virtually all is allocated to language and cultural promotion programs (Oppenheimer 476). In the end, it is important to remember that all the efforts of the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, its Instituto Camões, and related state and private initiatives within Portugal are relatively small-scale, compared to the resources injected into similar language and cultural promotion programs in the former French and British colonies, sponsored by their former metropoles through official organs such as the British Council and the Alliance Française. Many of their programs, in fact, are squarely aimed at Africans from lusophone countries. On the global level, the pervasive lingua franca of English, especially, and the promotion of anglophony in so many recent and emerging spheres of contemporary global culture, represent an enormously more powerful cultural force (Pennycook) xxxxxxxxxxxx Composing Lusophonia than whatever modest efforts Portugal is currently making regarding lusophonia. Portugal’s efforts must be understood as nothing less than a small-scale defensive holding action, designed to blunt overwhelming foreign domination, not only in relation to the former colonies, but also and perhaps primarily in relation to its own position within Europe. As the smallest country in the European Union next to Ireland, in terms of population, and certainly the poorest, Portugal is unique in being both Center to its own former colonies and emigrant communities abroad and also Periphery, in relation to Europe as a whole (Monteiro and Pinto; Bastos, “(In)visible”).12 In 1998, with its Expo, and a few years earlier, with Lisbon’s 1994 service as “European Capital of Culture” (Holton, “Dressing”), Portugal’s elites sought vigorously to put forward its European credentials (Sieber, “Remembering”). It is thus no surprise that the discourses emerging in 1998 concerning multiculturalism, Lusophonia, and Portuguese culture emulated those typically used elsewhere in Europe and North America more widely to characterize postcolonial relations and national identities. Such broader constructions also pervade notions of world music common in Europe and North America, as well as in Portugal. Discussing contemporary nationalist discourses in Europe, Etienne Balibar reminds us that in managing cultural differences, “classification and hierarchy are operations of naturalization par excellence or, more accurately, of projection of historical and social differences into the realm of an imaginary nature” (Balibar 56). Regarding such classification, we have seen that, in Lisbon in 1998, “Portuguese” and “lusophone” musics, despite their internal diversity and the ostensible celebration of their fusion, were categorized in fact as a separate, almost binary pair. Essentialist, even racialized conceptions of these two types of music were also evident, in that lusophone musics were always defined as being Other, exotic, not from Portugal and not linked with immigrant communities that had brought the colonial periphery into the ostensible Center. Concerns with establishing authenticity, as Stephen Feld and others have noted, is a particularly Occidental preoccupation and reflects the power the Center exercises to select and validate others’ authentic cultural forms. Writing on world music more widely, in fact, Feld reminds us that the wider distinction maintained between “music” and “world music” implies and naturalizes an older, persistent hierarchy between the two types of cultural expression: “The relationship of the colonizing and the colonized thus remained generally intact in distinguishing music from world music” (Feld 147). In Portugal’s case, this hierarchization was obvious in the historically particular definitions and very unequal prominence given the two types of music in programming and choice of venue. 183 Diaspora 11:2 2002 A deeper, ideological hierarchization, however, was also patent in the manner in which European elements from Portugal, but not any foreign or lusophone ones, were defined as providing the universal linkages among all musical variants. Exactly what these Portuguese-supplied universals are, of course, was never articulated but just assumed as a natural outgrowth of the former empire, in which the Portuguese “transformed” the colonies through their influence and became the common, coordinating element among them. The casting of the Portuguese elements as universal and neutral—exactly as in classical lusotropicalism—disconnects historic cultural exchanges entirely from underlying asymmetries in economic and political power, serving to conceal or to declare them irrelevant. That world music, including lusophone music, is in fact generally produced, promoted, and disseminated “in cosmopolitan and metropolitan centers” (Feld 152) like Lisbon also speaks clearly about the Center’s obvious benefits from advancing such musical categorizations. The enormous power of music to naturalize persisting postcolonial and related class hierarchies was evident in 1998 Lisbon, in that the programming within this sphere of cultural production generated virtually no public criticism or controversy. In sharp contrast, Expo’s Portuguese history and heritage programs provoked extensive, loud, and quite public controversy—even though the postcolonial discourse and especially the framing of Portugal’s relations to its former colonies were quite similar in both areas (see Sieber, Remembering). Even musical critics such as Carlos Martins and the Orquestra Sons da Lusofonia had little opening to offer counterhegemonic views. Due to world music’s enormous power to “normalize and naturalize contemporary globalization” (Feld 152), the 1998 musical program was seen by most as lying outside the field of critical scrutiny, simply a rich smorgasbord of pleasurable entertainment that supposedly addressed every possible taste. Notes 1. Earlier versions of this paper were presented as part of the panel on Longing and Belonging in Atlantic Europe, at the 99th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, in San Francisco, California, November 2000, and at the conference on Race, Culture, Nation: Arguments across the Portuguese-Speaking World, April 2001, at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and Brown University. The research was carried out with the support of the Luso-American Cultural Commission (Lisbon); the Universidade Aberta of Lisbon; CITIDEP, the Research Center on Information Technologies and Participatory Democracy (Lisbon); the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnólogia; and the University of Massachusetts, Boston. I am deeply grateful for all the support offered. I also thank Angela Cacciarru-Sieber for her invaluable collaboration in the research, Onésimo Almeida for his gracious advice, and Andrea Klimt and Stephen Lubkemann for their important encouragement and editorial advice. Several anonymous reviewers provided helpful constructive criticism. 184 Composing Lusophonia 2. These are the expressive forms that represented Lusophonia at the Biennial Convention of Young Artists of the Commonwealth of Lusophone Nations, held at Praia, Cape Verde, in July 1998, with 180 participants from all the lusophone countries except for Brazil. In addition, at the 1998 festival in Guimaraes, in northern Portugal—the fourth in a series of “cultural capitals of Lusophonia,” following Praia, Rio de Janeiro, and Macao—displays and performances of lusophone culture included music, cinema, plastic arts, theater, poetry, and dance and were accompanied by many panels and conferences among lusophone artists from around the world (“Capital” 36). A wide range of such events, exhibits, festivals, conferences, and panels were also organized during the period of Expo, to foster discussion and celebration of lusophone arts and expression. 3. All passages quoted from Portuguese- or French-language sources have been translated by the author. 4. During the Salazar era, this same pattern obtained. At the 1940 “Portuguese World” exposition in Lisbon, for example, indigenous people from the colonies brought for display were exoticized as primitives, very far from European in identity (Lèonard 215), and creole forms were underplayed. Also, little attention was paid in colonial Portugal to Europeans who had either “gone native” or been creolized themselves, through accepting African influences (Margarido 67). 5. Fado was considered thus, despite the fact of its urban origins, its twentieth-century transition from working-class to bourgeois art form, and its thoroughgoing commercialization as a tourist attraction in recent decades. It was a safe choice for festival planners to include as a sort of ethnic Portuguese music. 6. PALOPs include Cape Verde, São Tome e Príncipe, Guinea Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique. 7. Also, see Sieber (Sieber, “Public Participation”) for a discussion of the lack of consultation in overall Expo planning and development, with the mostly poor and working-class adjoining neighborhoods or even with the Lisbon city government. 8. When the Red Hot + Lisbon concert later occurred at Expo on July 11, 1998, not a single one of the non-Portuguese artists appeared, even though they were the majority of artists on the album. This revealed again how artificial the album’s musical collaborations were and how little they were rooted in Lisbon as a place. 9. In earlier work on world music in Boston (Sieber, “World Class City”), I discovered a very similar disconnect between an exoticized and decontextualized world music scene, patronized mostly by highly educated, Anglo-American elites, and a much wider array of available ethnic musics, animating local immigrant communities and their own much more numerous performance venues. 10. In acknowledging the historical continuities with the colonial era, it is useful to remember that Portugal’s colonial Statute of Indigenism, in force from 1926 until 1961, emphasized the “absolute inferiority of the black man” (Lèonard 214–5) and led to a consequent division of the population in the colonies into three categories: Portuguese citizens, assimilados, and indigenas. Theoretically, the non-racist character of Portuguese colonialism was reflected in the fact that regardless of race, any colonial through education could become an assimilado. In practice, however, the status of “assimilado” was one only few people ever actually achieved and the few assimilados who did exist were subject to severe social discrimination (Fry 127). This racial hierarchization was preserved intact when Portugal, in a 1951 attempt to resist the decolonization that had already begun elsewhere in Europe, declared all the colonies as overseas provinces of Greater Portugal itself. 11. With the dynamic Brazilian economy dwarfing that of Portugal itself, Brazil has been overlooked in favor of the weaker African former colonies. Even during the height of Salazarian colonialism in the mid-twentieth century, as well as earlier, the Portuguese African colonies did not play a strong role in the metropole’s economic life, and since decolonization in the mid-1970s, this is even less the case. Since 1980, the PALOPs have never accounted for more than 5.9% of Portuguese exports or more than 0.5% of its imports (Oppenheimer 470). In addition, very little xxxxxxxxxxxx 185 Diaspora 11:2 2002 Portuguese private foreign investment is directed toward the PALOPs: from 1987 to 1990, only 7.2%, and from 1991 to 1994, even less at 2.4%. Though clearly not economically important for Portugal, they have a wider strategic political and diplomatic significance. 12. Most often the overall designation is simply “semi-peripheral” (e.g., Oppenheimer). Works Cited Almeida, Onésimo Teotónio. “Concernant la lusophonie: ce que la langue n’est pas.” Unpublished ms., 2000. Alves, Dario Moreira de Castro. “Interculturalismo e cidadania em espaços lusófonos: a CPLP—Fundamentaçäo politico-cultural e os tres anos e meio da história de sua formaçäo.” Rocha-Trindade, Interculturalismo 21–39. Aguiar, Manuela. “Communidades lusófonas: migrações e cidadania.” Rocha-Trindade, Interculturalismo 91–107. Baganha, Maria I. “Migrações internacionais de e para Portugal: o que sabemos e para onde vamos?” Revista crítica de ciências socias 52/53 (Nov 1998/Feb 1999): 229–80. Balibar, Etienne. “Racism and Nationalism.” Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. By Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein. New York: Verso, 1991. 37–67. Bastos, Cristiana. Commentary on “Anthropology and Fieldwork in Post Democratic Portugal.” American Anthropological Association 99th Annual Meeting. San Francisco. Nov. 2000. ———. “(In)visible Borders: Ideologies of Sameness and Otherness in a Portuguese Context.” Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies 1 (1998): 19–32. Brettell, Caroline. “The Emigrant, the Nation, and the State in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Portugal: An Anthropological Approach.” Portuguese Studies Review 2 (1993): 51–65. Cahen, Michel. Des caravelles pour le futur? Discours politique et idéologie dans l’institutionalisation de la communauté des pays de langue portugaise. Maison des pays iberiques and Centre d’étude d’Afrique noire 391–433. Catalão, Rui. "Mas lusófono do que portugues." O Público 17 April 1998: 21. Cunha, Isabel Ferin. “Nós e os outros nos artigos de opinião da imprensa portuguesa.” 435–68. De Souza, Teotónio R. “Some Contrasting Visions of Luso-Tropicalism in India.” Maison des pays iberiques and Centre d’étude d’Afrique noire 377–87. “Capital cultural da lusófonia de 1998.” Diário de notícias [Lisbon] 6 May 1998: 36. Erickson, Frederick. “The Music Goes Round and Round: How Music Means in School.” Educational Theory 45 (1995): 19–34. Feld, Steven. “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music.” Public Culture 12 (2000): 145–71. Feldman-Bianco, Bela. “Multiple Layers of Time and Space: The Construction of Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism among Portuguese Immigrants. Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration. Ed. N.G. Schiller, L. Basch, and C. Blanc-Szanton. Annals 645. New York: New York Academy of Sciences,1993. 145–74. Festas de Lisboa. Programação 1998. Lisboa: Camara Municipal de Lisboa, 1998. 186 Composing Lusophonia Fry, Christopher. “Cultures of Difference: The Aftermath of Portuguese and British Colonial Policies in Southern Africa.” Social Anthropology 8 (2000): 117–43. Fundação de Oriente. Music from Near and Far. Street bill. 1998. Gama, Jaime. “Portugal, Europe, and Lusophone Africa.” The New Portugal: Democracy and Europe. Ed. Richard Herr. Berkeley: U California at Berkeley, International and Area Studies, 1992. 57–61. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. Hannerz, Ulf. “Cosmopolitans and locals in world culture.” Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity. Ed. Mike Featherstone. Newbury Park: Sage, 1990. 237–51. Holton, Kimberly Dacosta. “Dressing for Success.” Journal of American Folklore 111 (1998): 173–96. ———. Telephone Interview. 21 Dec. 2001. Klimt, Andrea. “Enacting National Selves: Authenticity, Adventure, and Disaffection in the Portuguese Diaspora.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 6 (2000): 513–50. Léonard, Yves. “Salazarisme et lusotropicalisme, histoire d’une appropriation.” Maison des pays iberiques and Centre d’étude d’Afrique noire 211–26. Lisboa, João. “Lisboa + Londres.” Expresso artes [Lisbon] 16 May 1998: 33. Lourenço, Eduardo. A Nau de Icaro, seguido de imagem e miragem da lusófonia. Lisboa: Gradiva, 1998. Louro, Maria. Author’s fieldnotes. 13 July 1998. Maia, Maria Armandina, and Antonio Massano, eds. Lingua portuguesa: um oceano de culturas. Lisbon: Instituto Camões, 1998. Maison des pays iberiques and Centre d’étude d’Afrique noire. Lusotopie: Lusotropicalisme, ideologies coloniales et identités nationales dans les mondes lusophones. Paris: Karthala, 1997. Marco Paulo Espectáculos, Lda. Marco Paulo <http://www.artiespectaculos.pt/musicaa/82.html>. e sua banda. 2 Jan. 2002. Margarido, Alfredo. A Lusófonia e os lusófonos: novos mitos portugueses. Lisboa: Universitárias Lusófonas, 2000. Martins, Carlos. Interview by author. 10 July 1998. ———. “Sobre os musicos.” Liner notes. Martins, Caminho. Martins, Carlos, and Orquestra Sons da Lusófonia. Caminho longe—sons da lusofonia au vivo. Lisboa: Discos Populares, Valentim de Carvalho Música, 1998. Monteiro, Nuno, and António Costa Pinto. “Cultural Myths and Portuguese National Identity.” Modern Portugal. Ed. António Costa Pinto. Palo Alto, CA: Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 1998. 206–17. Oppenheimer, Jochen. “Realités et mythes de la coopération portugaise.” 469–78. Parque Expo, S.A. Espectáculos—programação cultural. Lisbon: Parque Expo, 1997. 187 Diaspora 11:2 2002 ———. Relatório: Exposição Mundial de Lisboa de 1998. Lisbon: Parque Expo, 1999. Pennycook, Alastair. The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language. New York: Longman, 1999. Red Hot Organization. Onda Sonora: Red Hot + Lisbon. Red Hot Organization, 1998. Onda Sonora: Red Hot + Lisbon. 31 Dec. 2001 <http://www.redhot.org/projects/ondaindex.html>. Rocha-Trindade, Maria Beatriz, ed. Interculturalismo e cidadania em espaços lusófonos. Lisboa: Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses; Publicições EuropaAmerica, 1998. Rocha-Trindade, Maria-Beatriz. “Lusófonia, interculturalidade e cidadania.” Rocha-Trindade, Interculturalismo 11–3. Sieber, R. Timothy. “The World Class City: Elite Dimensions of Transnationalism in Boston.” The Transnational Culture of Cities Panel. Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Georgia. November 1994. ———. “Public Participation in Environmental Impact Assessment: A Comparison of Urban Waterfront Redevelopment in Lisbon, Portugal and Boston, USA.” Public Participation and Information Technology 1999. Ed. João Joanaz de Melo and Pedro Ferraz de Abreu. Lisbon: New U Lisbon; CITIDEP, 2000. 287–304. ———. “Remembering Vasco da Gama: Contested Histories and the Cultural Politics of Contemporary Nation-Building in Lisbon, Portugal.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 8 (2001): 549–81. Tabucchi, Antonio. “Point de vue—suspecte lusophonie.” Le Monde [Paris] 18 Mar. 2000: 18–9. “Todas as línguas do português.” Expresso cartaz [Lisbon] 18 July 1998: 2. 188