Imperial Ghosts, Imperial Dreams in the Portuguese Contemporary Imaginary

Negotiating Identities, 2011

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This study interrogates a series of utopian projections that have informed Portuguese and Luso-African letters and culture since the Renaissance. Concentrating on the three crucial historical moments – Portugal’s tenuous hegemony in the Asian seas in the sixteenth century, the collapse of its colonial empire in the mid-1970s, and the post-independence period of re-evaluating nationalisms in Africa – the study examines the familiar “long narrative” which casts the Portuguese Discoveries as an inaugural and enabling event in Europe’s conquest of the world. In the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts, a sense of belatedness and danger in the face of a vast commercial network which preceded by several centuries Portugal’s arrival in Asia undercuts this account. The narratives about Portugal’s colonial wars in Africa negate the Salazarist project to restore the mythologized age of discoveries and seek simultaneously to converge with anti-colonial guerrilla movements. The work of António Lobo Antunes eschews this trend, insisting instead upon the incommensurability between the liberation struggles and Portugal’s April Revolution. Concomitantly, recent Lusophone African literature pictures the struggle of liberation as a cancellation of historicity, and underscores the “differend” between official constructions of nationhood and the future imagined from below. Reviews “This boldly designed and splendidly executed inquiry into discourses of colonial and postcolonial experience in the Portuguese-speaking world merits a readership as wide and varied as is the scope of its author’s interests and expertise. Dr. Madureira moves with ease and elegance over the vast territory of Portuguese, Brazilian and Lusophone-African literatures, historiography and criticism from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first ... This is comparative literature at its best – and one can only hope that readers from outside the usual-suspects circle of academics specializing in Luso-Afro-Brazilian studies will recognize it as well.” – Professor Anna Klobucka, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth “Madureira’s Imaginary Geographies manages, in all its referential complexity, and against all odds, to interweave a series of diverse theoretical perspectives from a number of cultural traditions to make a critical rethinking of an interconnected world in continual, ongoing semantic transition possible—especially given that this world, whether in Portuguese or any number of other languages, continues both “narratives of discovery and empire” and, just as importantly, narratives of resistance and alternative cultural agency.” – Prof. Christopher Larkosh, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for Ellipsis: Journal of the American Portuguese Studies Association

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Ellipsis, 2006

Through the examination of Camões’s Os Lusíadas, Sena’s Os Grão-Capitães and Saramago’s A Jangada de Pedra, this article explores violence as a means of shaping Portuguese identity in different historical contexts, and how these works portray the continued recourse to violence as Portugal moves from colonizing to postcolonial nation.

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Routledge eBooks, 2021

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Portuguese Studies Review, 2017

The editors of the present special issue have aimed to bring to the fore recent, innovative research on a wide variety of territories and topics that explore the imperial archive and memory to bring to life colonial situations in different locations. From the outset, it was our intention to demonstrate the geographical, social, economic, political and cultural diversity of empire through a broad thematical prism. The most recurrent topics with regard to the Third Portuguese Empire such as (forced) labour, race, ideology, economic underdevelopment and conflict, have been complemented with studies that take a closer look at the state and colonial administration, colonial accounts, private enterprise, science, public health, violence and gender.The time frame of these contributions, from the late nineteenth century to the end of empire, and the spatial focus including Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique and Goa, provide examples of the current state of the art of archival fieldwork and memory related research on the ‘modern’ and ‘late’ Portuguese colonial empire and its populations.

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Portuguese Studies Review, 2017

Portuguese Studies Review, Vol. 25, nº1 (2017), pp. 3-13 (with Cláudia Castelo and Philip J. Havik)

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International History Review, 2017

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

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Mester, 2004

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