Popular Communication The International Journal of Media and Culture ISSN: 1540-5702 (Print) 1540-5710 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hppc20 The construction of a transnational Lusophone media space: A historiographic analysis Stuart Davis, Joseph Straubhaar & Isabel Ferin Cunha To cite this article: Stuart Davis, Joseph Straubhaar & Isabel Ferin Cunha (2016): The construction of a transnational Lusophone media space: A historiographic analysis, Popular Communication, DOI: 10.1080/15405702.2016.1222614 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2016.1222614 Published online: 26 Sep 2016. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=hppc20 Download by: [Stuart Davis] Date: 26 September 2016, At: 09:38 POPULAR COMMUNICATION http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15405702.2016.1222614 The construction of a transnational Lusophone media space: A historiographic analysis Stuart Davisa, Joseph Straubhaarb, and Isabel Ferin Cunhac a Texas A&M International University; bUniversity of Texas-Austin; cUniversity of Coimbra ABSTRACT This piece examines the historical construction of a Lusophone cultural-linguistic media space and market that spans portions of Europe, Africa, and South America. Beginning with the Portuguese colonization of Brazil and Lusophone Africa in the 17th century and continuing to the contemporary moment, our discussion examines how a combination of political, ideological, and economic patterns created linkages between Portugal, Brazil, and Portuguese-speaking colonies in Africa (namely Angola, Cape Verde, and Mozambique). After examining how Brazil grew to become the dominant cultural producer in this transnational matrix (most explicitly expressed through the massive exports of telenovelas and music since the late 1970s), we examine how other countries are beginning to carve out distinctive national niches, including the contemporary music scene in Cape Verde and the rise of domestically produced telenovelas in Portugal and Angola that are increasing in circulation in the contemporary transnational Lusophone media space. Introduction This piece examines the historical construction of a Lusophone cultural-linguistic media space and market that spans portions of Europe, Africa, and South America. Beginning with the Portuguese colonization of Brazil and Lusophone Africa in the 17th century and continuing to the contemporary moment, our discussion examines how a combination of political, ideological, cultural/media, and economic patterns created linkages among Portugal, Brazil, and Portuguese-speaking colonies in Africa (namely Angola, Cape Verde, and Mozambique). While we acknowledge the important contributions offered by economic and political historians such as Charles Boxer (1969) and Luiz Felipe de Alencastro (2001) to understanding how this transatlantic network developed through geopolitical alliances, human migration, and the expansion of trade routes, our piece looks specifically at the cultural history of this transnational region. In this pursuit, we forward two claims regarding geocultural power in this space. Our first claim is that Portugal always had weak ideological and political control over its colonial holdings. Our second (and related) claim posits that due to certain key historical factors, Brazil came to culturally dominate the Lusophone space in the 20th century. As our discussion of the geopolitical power relations within this transnational configuration progresses, we will gradually shift from talking about Brazil’s exercise of political and ideological hegemony to economic hegemony through media exports and coproductions. While mass media were not a significant part of the Lusophone cultural fabric in the beginnings of Portuguese colonization, they became increasingly important in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the current stage of Lusophone identity and development, Brazilian popular music and television are among the most powerful forces in maintaining and reconstructing a transnational Lusophone media space. CONTACT Stuart Davis stuart.davis@tamiu.edu Department of Psychology and Communication, Texas A&M International University, 324D Lamar Bruni Vergara Building, 5201 University Boulevard, Laredo, TX 78401, USA. © 2016 Taylor & Francis 2 S. DAVIS ET AL. In examining how a variety of cultural artifacts (from newspapers to popular theater to history textbooks in school to public diplomacy “visits”) intersected to create and fuel this transnational space, we follow Burkart and Christensen’s (2013) critique of research on popular communication that “considers culture as foundational for social reality” (p. 2). Following the authors, we posit that the cultural activities under discussion are “made popular as a consequence of changing political, economic, and technological factors” (Burkart & Christensen, 2013, p. 2). Hence, our conceptualization of “popular communication” as a current flowing through the Lusophone media space is twofold, related to both political/cultural ideology and economics.1 At certain points in our history, cultural dominance cannot be explained without recourse to political economy (e.g., Schiller, 1997). In other points, asymmetry is more closely related to issues in the cultural or political realm like the Portuguese government’s relatively relaxed approach toward regulating news content in its colonies in the 18th and 19th centuries. Cultural proximity and power in transnational media spaces In order to understand the decline of Portuguese influence and subsequent rise of Brazilian influence over the Lusophone world, we first need to define what we mean conceptually by a “transnational media space.” Within media studies scholarship, transnational spaces are often defined either by the formation of a diaspora through the movement of humans (Georgiou, 2006) or the movement of media objects or formats across multiple national boundaries (Naficy, 1993). For our discussion, we will draw on the second definition to examine how the content circulating among different nations within this space reflect certain power asymmetries. In the Lusophone context, this form of transnational space is created through a historical process of hybridization where geographically dispersed spaces are linked by shared languages, cultural practices, and academic interactions (Cunha, 2012; Nederveen Pieterse, 2004). Following Straubhaar (1991), we draw on the concept of “cultural proximity” to analyze how these transnational spaces are generated. Developed in the 1980s as a response to a set of theoretical assumptions within the then-popular model of media imperialism, cultural proximity attempted to provide a corrective for what Fejes (1981) calls a static interpretation of domination and dependency that “tends to obscure the complex relationships and dynamics that exist among external and internal factors” (p. 286). As a sort of adhesive that connects transnational spaces, cultural proximity creates connections through a variety of practices including religion, language, definitions of humor, musical traditions, and storytelling practices (Straubhaar, 2007). These elements of shared identity facilitate the flow of culture and media. While drawing on cultural proximity as a theory for describing the dynamics that create and maintain transnational cultural spaces, we follow Kraidy (2005) in arguing against a form of cultural relativism that praises the uniqueness and creativity of hybrid practices that develop within these spaces. Instead we support the claim that “(1) the local is intricately involved in supra-local relations and (2) exogenous and endogenous circuits of power pervade the local” (Kraidy, 2005, p. 155). Through this cultural linguistic transnational space, we also raise two conceptual points related to issues of power asymmetries within networks launched by and nourished through cultural proximity. The first point, raised by Arenas (2005), argues that contemporary Portugal is most aptly characterized as a “semi-peripheral European country” with a “subalternized position in the world system after the late [16th] century” (Arenas, 2005, p. 4). Beginning during the “Age of Discovery” in the 15th century, the nation flourished economically through aggressive global exploration and subsequent establishment of trade routes spanning the Atlantic and Indian Oceans (Boxer, 1969; Veríssimo Serrão, 1978). However, due to conflicts with Spain in Europe and the Netherlands in Brazil and Lusophone Africa, Portugal’s political and economic strength withered in the 17th 1 Our combined focus on ideological and economic power follows in many ways what political economists Winseck and Peck call “structural power” or “dominance that draws on both material and symbolic resources” (2007, p. 9). POPULAR COMMUNICATION 3 century. In contrast, from the 18th century onward Brazil rose from a peripheral economic and political actor to one of the largest economic producers in the world (as a “BRIC”) (Straubhaar, 2009). Building on Brazil’s ascendancy, our second point raises a connection between ideological and economic domination within a shared transnational cultural/linguistic space. Although it would be an overstatement to claim a direct link between Brazil’s influence on Portuguese cultural policy (through the Policy of the Spirit and Lusotropicalism) and its later economic domination, both present strategies for how one actor within a shared linguistic-cultural region asserts power over others. Furthermore, Brazil’s subsequent emergence as the Lusophone space’s dominant media and cultural industry power also links a similar kind of economic and cultural power. By highlighting practices of cultural domination within a theorization of cultural proximity, our study addresses critiques that this theory “ignor[es] the diverse historical contexts and internal differences within cultural formations” (Iwabuchi, 2002, p. 132). Historical periodization and methodological note To better understand how this Lusophone transnational media space developed and how Brazil came to dominate, we divide our discussion into three main periods: the beginning of colonization until the independence of Brazil in the early 19th century; the early 20th century until the end of Portuguese colonialism in Africa (circa 1974–1975); and the 1970s to the present. During the first period, the Portuguese language was established as common language, at least among educated people in the colonies. Furthermore, the Portuguese Crown set up judicial, educational, and cultural institutions within its holdings. At the same time, though, the Portuguese administration held a relatively relaxed attitude toward regulating or censoring news production in its Brazilian and African colonies. In this moment a number of local newspapers, musical styles, and other cultural activities developed relatively independently of Portuguese authorities. Many of these media outlets were openly critical of the colonial administration, especially after Brazilian independence in the late 19th century. The second period tracks the cultural rise and subsequent influence of Brazil as the ideological center of the Lusophone Empire in the early 20th Century. During this period, Brazilian cultural theorist Gilberto Freyre developed Lusotropicalism, the first coherent theoretical framework for describing the cultural fabric that connected component countries within Portugal’s domain. During the 1950s, the Portuguese government mobilized this theory as a cultural strategy for attempting to pacify anticolonial movements in its Lusophone colonies. The third period directly discusses the drastic increase in the exportation of Brazilian telenovelas within the Lusophone space, particularly in Portugal. While the actions of national government policy makers, thinkers, and cultural formations continue to be very relevant (as does the continued definition of global media markets by Hollywood), the main actors in this current phase are media conglomerates from Brazil in the areas of television and music (TV Globo) and publishing (Editora Abril) seeking to extend commercial markets. In tracking major cultural currents within this shared space, we utilize a historiographic approach that attempts to draw out larger ideological or economic trends from academic, professional, and commercial literature produced by historians, economists, political leaders, literary critics, television producers, and other individuals writing about the shared Lusophone transnational space over the past 400 years. Our approach is both interdisciplinary in scope and attentive to works published outside of the linguistic and theoretical frameworks of Anglophone scholarship. An explicit goal of this study is to incorporate scholars writing about the Lusophone transnational space from within this space into our narrative. Hence, we draw heavily on academic texts published in Portuguese by presses within Portugal, Brazil, Mozambique, and Angola. In this pursuit, we are attempting to “tell the story” of scholars whose work has not been translated into English. By adopting this approach we hope to answer calls issued by 4 S. DAVIS ET AL. postcolonial theorist Walter Mignolo and others to move contemporary scholarship away from approaches coming from Anglophone linguistic and academic communities (Mignolo, 2009). Economic and cultural autonomy in the construction of the Portuguese empire, 1600s to early 1900s In this section, we will discuss two central trends in Portugal’s relationship with its colonies during their earliest stages: the high degrees of economic and political autonomy of Portuguese colonists in Mozambique and Angola from centralized Portuguese bureaucratic structures and the relative strength of Brazil in terms of economic production and political administrative structures. We see both of these trends in action when analyzing newspaper production in the African colonies and Brazil.2 Lusophone Africa displayed a much more varied picture of colonial investment than Macau, East Timor, and other Portuguese colonies in Southern and Southeastern Asia. While GuineaBissau and Cape Verde were used largely as relatively undeveloped trading ports with little infrastructural investment, Angola and Mozambique promised a much greater space for Portuguese expansion. In these areas the Portuguese gave authorities a great deal of autonomy to the social groups involved in the actual economic and political administration of the colonies. In this regard, Mozambique offers the most striking case of Portugal’s weak participation in colonial state formation and governance. As Isaacman (1972) argues, the Criollos (the mixed-race ruling group in Mozambique) began to develop independent arrangements for cotton production and distribution with Brazilian exporters and with preexisting tribal organizations. Salamão (1961) tracks a similar process in Angola: As early as 1655, Portugal offered incentives for farmers to move into the central portions of Angola in order to begin increasing agricultural production. The combination of the Portuguese government’s push for settler colonialism and the ability of settlers to make economic arrangements for distribution that did not require the colonial host to mediate fostered economic autonomy in these colonies in the 18th and 19th centuries. Newspaper production in Lusophone Africa during this period was characterized by a similar sense of autonomy, especially by the late 19th century. The earliest newspapers were launched by local colonial governments in the 1830s to inform settlers of the legal provisions established by the central government (Cunha, 1997; Lopo, 1964). By the 1890s the number of newspapers critiquing or challenging the colonial government grew, providing means whereby the Portuguese elites in the colonies and their African counterparts began to exert more independence (Ribeiro, 2005). In Mozambique the first nonofficial newspapers launched in the 1860s, including O Progresso [The Progress] (1868), O Africano [The African] (1877), O Vigilante [The Vigilante] (1882) and O Clamor Africano [The African Cry] (1892). Many of these, especially O Clamor Africano, exhibited an explicitly confrontational orientation toward the colonial Portuguese presence (Cunha, 1992, 1997). In Cape Verde the first nonofficial newspaper, O Almanach Luso-Africano [The Luso-African Almanac], was launched in the early 1890s. This newspaper, essentially a literary journal, took as its mission the “celebration of our authentically African culture” and featured contributions in Portuguese and Creole (Ferreira, 1987). After the independence of Brazil in 1891 a series of newspapers including Arauto Africano [The African Herald] (Mozambique), Echo de Angola (Angola), and Farol do Povo [The People’s Lighthouse] (Angola) were developed for the express purposes of supporting Brazilian independence (Freudenthal, 2001; Lopo, 1964). Throughout the 19th century, news outlets in Lusophone Africa reflected a sense of political autonomy from Portugal, a critical stance toward the colonial government, and (later) solidarity with Brazilian patriots. 2 We have chosen to address newspapers and not books during this period due to lack of availability of materials covering this area in the Lusophone African context. While there have been several studies examining the history of Brazilian literature during the colonial period (e.g., Monteiro, 1961) as well as the history of the print industry (e.g., Hallewall, 1982), the coverage on the history of literature and book production in Mozambique, Angola, etc. is not well documented. POPULAR COMMUNICATION 5 While the African colonies were largely left unincorporated within the colonial system of economic production, Brazil rose to become Portugal’s main producer through the cultivation or extraction of agricultural products (namely sugar) and precious metals during the 18th and 19th centuries (Boxer, 1969). The drastic wealth increases accompanying heightened production created a group of ruling colonial elites that began to establish their own governance organs (Alencastro, 2001). Brazil’s growing political and economic power reached a high point in 1808 when the Napoleonic Wars forced the Portuguese royal family and court to relocate to Rio de Janeiro. When the court moved to Brazil, the government quickly gave the colony the designation of “kingdom” within the “United Kingdom of Portugal.” This change in title was accompanied with being granted a higher status in economic and political policy development (Buarque de Hollanda, 1976). Throughout the first two decades of the 19th century, Brazilian politicians, economists, and other actors became integral for the maintenance of a transitional Portuguese government teetering between two continents. In 1821, Brazil was granted formal independence after a rebellion instigated by the emperor’s son, Dom Pedro II. In a similar way to the Lusophone African colonies, the Portuguese crown was neither overattentive nor overbearing in its censorship of news production. The first Brazilian newspaper with widespread distribution was O Correio Braziliense [The Brazilian Mail], launched in 1821 while publisher Hipolita da Costa was living in London. This paper was openly critical of the Portuguese court and advocated for Brazilian independence (Rizzini, 1959). Other newspapers launched during this period included A Gazeta de Notícias [The News Gazette] and O País [The Nation], two proIndependence regional newspapers that were published from the 1840s until the beginning of the Vargas regime in the early 1930s. Similar to many publications in Lusophone Africa, these outlets were highly critical of Portuguese rule, emphasizing its weakness in maintaining political control over its population (Cunha, 1997; Rizzini, 1959). Brazilian influence on Portuguese cultural policy and public diplomacy, 1920s to 1970s In the early to mid-20th century, Brazilian cultural and political power within the Lusophone space continued to grow. Two periods in particular illustrate the Brazilian influence on Portuguese domestic and international policy. The first started in the late 1920s with the creation of the Estado Novo, the civilian regime carved out of a 1926 military coup staged by António de Oliveira Salazar. In the wake of the coup, Salazar’s administration adapted many of the cultural programs (including art, theater, and music) launched by the Brazilian government a decade before to create a sense of shared national identity. During the second period (roughly 1951–1970) the Portuguese government faced growing unrest in its African colonies as the wave of decolonization spread. Lacking the resources to effectively maintain military control, Salazar’s government adopted Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre’s theory of Lusotropicalism as the official foreign policy strategy for Portugal’s African colonies. Both of those moments amplified Brazil’s growing position as the dominant cultural power in the Lusophone transnational matrix. During its formative years, Salazar’s government looked to visual, performing, and literary arts as tools for building a new sense of national identity that repackaged tradition and cultural heritage as antidotes to political threats from left-wing and Anarchist agitators and economic problems due to lack of industrial growth and increasing stagnation (de Almeida, 2000; Sapega, 2008). In an attempt to harness artistic production as an avenue for building national culture, the Secretariat of National Propaganda (under the direction of Antoio Ferro) drew heavily on the 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna [Week of Modern Art] in São Paulo. This famous event, which featured the participation of several artists who would later go on to work with the secretariat (notably poet Plínio Salgado) received international attention for the way it articulated a “Brazilian” form of art that hybridized international aesthetic influences from Expressionism to Dada with specific referents drawn from popular culture within Brazil (Ramirez & Olea, 2004, 6 S. DAVIS ET AL. p. 31). For Ferro, this event offered the potential of using artistic activity to rewrite popular history through the lens of cultural nationalism. Inspired by the Week of Modern Art, his Política do Espírito [Policy of the Spirit] program was designed to mobilize visual and performing arts in an attempt to reinvent the Portuguese nation-state as a “historical foundation of cultural inspiration” for itself and its African colonies (Henriques, 1990). As part of this endeavor, Brazilian president Vargas recruited and sent cultural missions to Portugal in order to provide intellectual guidance on how to mobilize culture for a nationalist agenda. Ferro and others in the Portuguese administration were particularly interested in the way Vargas had recruited popular samba performers to record pro-government radio performances in the 1920s, created a subfield of Brazilian literature dedicated to “cultural nationalism,” and sponsored theater groups to travel across the country to perform historically based plays about the consolidation of the nation-state (Haussen, 2010; McCann, 2004; Williams, 2000). The end of World War II marked an even more explicit example of Brazilian influence over Portuguese cultural policy. During this period, Salazar’s government was facing more and more threats of fragmentation due to internal conflicts, pressures from international organizations like the United Nations (itself feeling pressured to condemn colonial holdings after the Bandung Conference in 1955), and unrest within its African colonies as radical anticolonial intellectuals like Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique and Amilcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau began to negotiate with the Soviet Union as a potential ally/benefactor (Henriksen, 1978). In this moment of geopolitical crisis, Portugal looked explicitly to Brazilian Lusotropicalism to revamp its ideological foundations. Developed by anthropologist Gilberto Freyre in the early 20th century, this theory argued that as a colonizing nation Portugal had always been tolerant of local and hybrid practices such as racial miscegenation/mixing and syncretic religious religions—especially compared to Spain’s ideology of the “purity of blood” or racial segregation in the United States (Freyre, 1940/2010). Instead, the Portuguese colonizers of Freyre’s theory “joyfully mixed with women of color and multiplied in mixed children” (Freyre, 1933/2002). As an ideology Lusotropicalism operated according to two fundamental points: that Portuguese are “softer” than other empire-builders in the cultural influence they exert and that Brazil represents the historical apex point within the development of Lusophone cultural space. What interested Salazar in Freyre’s work was the idea that Portuguese culture was fundamentally characterized by a certain plasticity of character that would allow it to mix easily with those peoples it sought to conquer. Salazar’s cabinet took this theory and transformed it with the help of Freyre into a “nationalist multicultural paradigm” in which the colonies should respect Portugal as a parent nation able to mix them into the hybrid process that had been going on for over 300 years (de Almeida, 2000). In 1961 Freyre was commissioned to write The Portuguese Integration in the Tropics, which not only became a mandatory part of the training process for future Portuguese diplomats but was also distributed in French to other United Nations member nations as part of an “international awareness campaign” (Castelo, 2012). As part of this campaign the Portuguese government also sponsored Freyre to go a speaking tour of cultural centers, public libraries, and civic organizations across Lusophone Africa to “promote peace and mutual understanding” (de Almeida, 2000). Furthermore, Criollo-owned newspapers in these countries were recruited by the Portuguese Foreign Service to promote Freyre’s visit as a way to bridge cultural differences between colonizers and the colonized (Dias, 1971). As a cultural policy aimed at justifying Portuguese rule, Lusotropicalism could not slow the momentum of revolutionary struggles in colonies like Angola and Mozambique. However, in a somewhat paradoxical fashion, the inoculation of the populations in colonies to the idea of Brazil as a more benign alternative to the typical colonial arrangement bolstered support for Brazil as a multicultural alternative to Portugal. We argue that from the embrace of literature, visual art, and theater during the formation of Estado Novo, Portugal increasingly abdicated its control over its own cultural image to Brazil. Domestically, this created a situation where Portuguese artists, writers, playwrights, and other cultural workers were not only censored by the Salazar regime but also in many cases pushed to POPULAR COMMUNICATION 7 incorporate the nationalist populism imported from Brazil. The ultimate outcome of this period was the lack of cultural production outside of the state apparatus: Portugal had only one theater group producing original material active in the 1950s and three in the 1960s (Borges, 2002). While promoting a Brazil-inspired domestic cultural policy, Portugal abdicated its foreign policy to Freyre’s version of Brazil-centric Lusotropicalism. Both domestically and internationally, Portugal’s ideological vision of its role within the Lusophone matrix was determined largely in reference to frameworks modeled on Brazil. Brazil as dominant exporter in the Lusophone transnational media space, 1970s to 2000s Our final section traces Brazil’s rise to be the most economically powerful cultural actor within the Lusophone transnational cultural and media space. This period is characterized by the emergence of a transnational Lusophone media space largely dominated by Brazilian television exports. During this period, market exchanges centered on and dominated by Brazil have become the dominant forces driving the Lusophone space (Souza, 1998). Although we reference postcolonial Lusophone Africa at various points, our discussion in this section largely focuses on Brazil’s domination of publishing and television production in Portugal. This period was instigated by a few key economic and social developments in Brazil including the increase of industrialization, the growth of a middle class, and sharp increases in adult literacy in the 1950s and 1960s (Straubhaar, 1982). Domestic cultural industries flourished during this period, as the increased demand for cultural products was amplified by increased public funding for the arts and for the enterprises of publishing, television, and radio broadcasting (Buarque de Hollanda, 2005). This led to an increasing body of massproduced literature, comic books, popular music shows, television sitcoms, and (perhaps most important) television soap operas, called telenovelas (Straubhaar, 1982). Addressing the spread of a few of these cultural industries illustrates Brazil’s rise to power as an exporter within the Lusophone space. Magazine and book publishing in Brazil expanded dramatically in the 1950s. Editora Abril, founded in 1950 by Italian immigrant Victor Civita, became the largest domestic magazine producer launched during this period. Based out of São Paulo, this franchise was able to grow rapidly by licensing characters like Donald Duck from the Walt Disney Corporation and using them in comic books (Gonçalo, 2004). The other major magazine and book publisher at this time was the Rio-based Editora Globo, founded in the late 19th century in southern Brazil but relocated to Rio de Janeiro in the 1940s. In Portugal, imported Brazilian magazines and books were extensively imported, even during periods when the Salazar regime was engaging in heavy censorship. Although the published content in Brazil was politically heterogeneous at this time, it was permitted due to the perceived ideological congruence between the Salazar and Vargas administrations (Hallewall, 1982). For example, the publication of the Brazilian books of Editora Dois Mundos and the books and magazines of Editora Abril were distributed in Portugal and read without censorship (Cunha, 2008). Many of these Brazilian publications (including those available in Portugal) were also permitted in Angola and Mozambique during the colonial period. Across these different parts of the Portuguese world, imported Brazilian literature was able to spread relatively fluidly among literate audiences (Hamilton, 1994). The role of Brazilian television in the development of a transnational Lusophone media and cultural space centers on TV Globo and the version of the telenovela it popularized (de Melo, 1995). While the Portuguese military government actively discouraged competition within the domestic television industry (having only one television station [Rádio e Televisão de Portugal; RTP] that was funded directly by the federal government), the military regime in Brazil actively supported the existing commercial media during its rule from 1964 to 1985. During this period, only one competitive network (TV Excelsior) was forced out of business by the military government through challenges to its parent company (Costa, 1986). Over the course of the 1960s, the military regime did not interfere with the development of any other preexisting networks (TV Tupi, TV Record, TV 8 S. DAVIS ET AL. Bandeirantes). In possibly the most significant step in the development of Brazilian commercial television, the military actively encouraged a new entrant, TV Globo, to start creating programming in 1964. TV Globo, whose owner Roberto Marinho actively supported the military regime, quickly emerged as both the dominant domestic network and most successful exporter of telenovelas (Mattos, 2000; Wallach, 2011). Although other networks did much of the seminal development of the telenovela genre in the 1950s and 1960s, TV Globo expanded rapidly in the late 1960s and early 1970s by hiring the best writers and producers away from other networks and investing heavily in developing its own acting, writing, and directing talent (Straubhaar, 1982). By the early 1970s, Globo’s novelas captured the national market, reaching audience shares that were seldom under 60% and often over 80% (Borelli & Priolli, 2000). In a rapidly growing advertising market that favored television investment over other media (Bolaño, 1988), TV Globo gained enormous profits. This financial success allowed TV Globo to create an increasing number of programs that were more technically sophisticated and well-produced than any content created in Portugal or anywhere else in the Lusophone space (de Melo, 1988). By the mid-1970s, TV Globo had begun to export its programs to various countries within the Lusophone media space. Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, the first program exported to Portugal, became so popular that businesses closed daily during the time slot when the show was airing (Cunha, 2003). The program was a sensation in the press, becoming the focus of much discussion and controversies over its linguistic and cultural impact on Portugal. As one journalist remembers: Crowds gathered at cafes to watch the shows and Prime Minister Mario Soares declared himself a fan. Communist leader Alvaro Cunhal, known for austerity, once said he arrived late for a TV appearance because he had been watching Gabriela. (Silver, 2005). Brazilian telenovelas continued to dominate the Portuguese prime time market throughout the 1980s and 1990s. By 1997, 48 out of 50 of the most heavily watched programs were Brazilian in origin (Nash, 1997). Based on the popularity of its programs, TV Globo created a Portuguese subsidiary network called Sociedade Independente de Comunicação (SIC; Sousa, 2002). Up until this point, imported television programs had to contract with the national public network—RTP—or other public stations. SIC was the first private network allowed to compete with existing public networks, demonstrating the economic and cultural power exercised in Portugal by TV Globo. As Silver reports, in 3 years SIC had obtained a larger share of the domestic market than RTP or other Portuguese channels: “SIC grabbed the ratings lead in 1995 from state-owned RTP … and held it through last year on soaps from Rio de Janeiro–based Organizacoes Globo SA, Latin America’s largest media group” (Cunha, 2012; Silver, 2005).3 One of the most visible impacts of Brazilian television in the current transnational Lusophone space occurred in 2008 when the Portuguese government passed a printed language reform act that essentially brought continental Portuguese spelling and usage into line with Brazilian Portuguese. If Portuguese media hoped to compete in Brazil or other Lusophone markets, they had to use what had become the dominant form of the shared language. This quote from Bernhard Warner, international correspondent for The Times, presents economic data to reinforce the economic, cultural, and human asymmetries that undergirded this decision: Why such a radical change for a language that had been doing fine for the past 2,000 years? The impact of globalization …, an ascendant former colony[,] and the influence of the Internet made the decision to go Brazilian unavoidable … the standardization … of the Portuguese language was inevitable. Brazil is the world’s fifth most populous country and is a much more powerful cultural and economic force than its European cousin. There are nearly 190 million Brazilians, compared with about 10.5 million Portuguese, and on the web 3 Although less empirical data is available for analysis, TV Globo’s telenovelas also exported very well to Lusophone countries in Africa. Interviews conducted by one of the authors with programmers at Radio TV Mozambique in 1992 and 1996 noted the popularity of TV Globo’s telenovelas among their audience. They have had considerably cultural impact (Pota Pacamutondo, 2014), as Brazilian music did earlier (and still does). POPULAR COMMUNICATION 9 Brazilians outnumber Portuguese by six to one, a disparity that will only increase in the coming years. (Warner, 2008) This description also aptly describes the dominance of Brazilian television in Portugal. Through its economic success TV Globo was able to reconfigure the space of Portuguese television, transforming the way the national government regulated television production and potentially helping instigate or further Brazilian cultural influence. Conclusion: Contra-flows within the Lusophone space We have argued that the dominance of Brazilian telenovelas offers the clearest example of Brazilian power within the Lusophone transnational media space. However, the contemporary moment is knotted with resistances or cultural contra-flows (Thussu, 2007). Within Portuguese television production, recent developments show signs that Brazil’s influence is waning to some degree. In recent years, SIC has started to adapt classic TV Globo shows to Portugal, using local actors and adapting the script to more closely fit Portuguese cultural specificities. For example, in 2012 SIC remade the 1976 Brazilian telenovela Dancing Days set in Lisbon with an entirely Portuguese cast (Diário de Notícias, 2012). Developments such as this indicate a degree of movement within Portuguese television from direct TV flows to coproduced, localized, and domestic narratives. If the rise of localized productions represents an incremental shift toward producing more culturally specific television, recent initiatives by RTP have directly focused on creating and exporting Portuguese television. In an attempt to assert its presence within the transnational Lusophone media space, the Portuguese government launched Rádio e Televisão de Portugal Internacional (RTPI) in 1992. Designed to be an international branch of its national public television network, RTPI began as a satellite service aimed at providing content at both other Lusophone nations and the Portuguese-speaking diaspora within the United States and other parts of Europe. In 1994, RTPI further extended its distribution capacities through the creation of terrestrial distribution networks within Lusophone Africa (Cunha, 2012). Since 1998, RTPI has also funded collaborations between Portuguese and Lusophone African television and film producers (Harrow, 2007). All of these initiatives by RTPI point to ways that Portugal is attempting to reassert its presence within a field largely dominated by Brazil. The recent global popularity of music from Portuguese-speaking African nations offers another contra-flow within the Lusophone cultural space. As the market for “world music” has grown steadily since the early 1980s (Taylor, 1997), a few artists from Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique are beginning to achieve popularity within the Lusophone market and the larger international music industry. Prominent examples include Cesária Évora and Sara Tavares from Cape Verde, who have both become prominent in world music distribution to Europe and the United States (Lee, 2009). The success of these artists has added a new layer of awareness of Lusophone African nations as sites of musical production (Arenas, 2011). New and interactive communications technologies have begun to offer other ways for creating cultural awareness within a shared Lusophone space. A recent study of blogging in the Portuguese-speaking world showed that bloggers in Portugal and Mozambique tended to refer to each other more and to address panLusophone issues more than did Brazilian bloggers, who tended to be more focused on specifically Brazilian national issues (Macedo, Martins, & Cabecinhas, 2011). This phenomenon potentially points to a new form of shared cultural space where Brazil does not exercise hegemony over all other actors. While the contra-flows discussed in this section signal both the rise of media products that begin to deteriorate Brazilian economic domination and attempts to create new transnational cultural spaces, the dominance of telenovelas and other forms of Brazilian cultural production still provide significant barriers for Portugal and Lusophone Africa. Returning to our initial claims, we argue that the history drawn here provides substantial evidence to support Arenas’ argument about the 10 S. 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