The Shifting Perspectives of Postcolonialism in a Lusophone World and the case of Portuguese Emigrat

1
The Shifting Perspectives of Postcolonialism in a
Lusophone World and the case of Portuguese
Emigration

• Dr Anthony Soares
• Queens University, Belfast

2
Maria Irene Ramalho and António Sousa Ribeiro,
Entre ser e estar (2001)

• Globalizations impact on the construction of
  identities can be felt particularly in modern
  populational fluxes, whether physical or
  psychological, of which globalization itself is
  also, to a large extent, a result peoples
  journeys, migrations, exiles, diasporas, the
  crossing of borders, the swift circulation of
  capital, ideas, words, images and values (11-12).

3
José Hermano Saraiva, História de Portugal (1993)

• The country consumed a lot, produced little, and
  the emigrants paid for the difference (441).

4
Patrick Chabal, Angola and Mozambique The
Weight of History (2001)

• Angola was a colony of settlement but of a
  nature which marked it out from British Africa.
  Other than the coffee plantation owners, clearly
  an elite among the colonists, the Portuguese
  settlers were poor, unskilled, uneducated and, on
  the whole, they failed to succeed as
  agriculturists. Unable to compete with Africans
  and without resources, they moved to the cities
  and survived as best they could by doing menial
  jobs (222).

5
Joel Serrão, A Emigração Portuguesa (1977)

• four successive legislative measures emanating
  from the central power and aimed at restricting
  an emigratory tendency that, from being
  colonizing in character, was gradually becoming
  purely emigratory (106).

6
Jorge Carvalho Arroteia, A Emigração Portuguesa
(1983)

• a progressive ageing of its population, which
  was not favourable to improvement in the
  relations of production and mechanization in the
  agricultural sector.
• the arrival of this labour, even unqualified,
  was extremely necessary to fill the gaps left by
  technological developments and by the departure
  of the local workforce, thereby giving rise to
  the revival of certain basic sectors of the
  economy, without the training costs that this
  would have normally entailed (117).

7
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)

• The Swede was a young man, lean, fair, and
  morose, with lanky hair and a shuffling gait. As
  we left the miserable little wharf, he tossed his
  head contemptuously at the shore. Been living
  there? he asked. I said, Yes. Fine lot these
  government chaps are they not? he went on,
  speaking English with great precision and
  considerable bitterness. It is funny what some
  people will do for a few francs a month. I wonder
  what becomes of that kind when it goes up
  country? I said to him I expected to see that
  soon. So-o-o! he exclaimed. He shuffled
  athwart, keeping one eye ahead vigilantly. Dont
  be too sure, he continued. The other day I took
  up a man who hanged himself on the road. He was a
  Swede, too. Hanged himself! Why, in Gods
  name? I cried. He kept on looking out
  watchfully. Who knows? The sun too much for him,
  or the country perhaps.

8
Theodore Zeldin, France 1848-1945 (1977)

• By 1860 emigration had become so active that
  France had no less than thirty-one authorised
  emigration agencies. The government, however,
  tried hard to restrict and obstruct emigration,
  because it was keen that if any Frenchmen did
  leave, they should go to Algeria (90).
• the people who went out from France were in
  general not driven out by poverty or
  unemployment many of them were enterprising
  individuals, making their own choice, rather than
  participating in a mass movement they were often
  artisans or even professional men anxious to make
  a fortune and to use their skills in a new
  environment (90).

9
Roger Magraw, France 1800-1914 (2002)

• the French colon emerged as a tough, macho
  figure well-suited to survive in a harsh,
  social-Darwinian world tanned, resourceful,
  capable of making deserts bloom and spearheading
  Frances struggle for survival (11).

10
Teolinda Gersão, Paisagem com mulher e mar ao
fundo (1985)

• este cais de desastre (this disastrous
  quay)(48).
• a country men leave, leaving in greater numbers
  every day, emigration and the war, the two forms
  of absence (46).

11
Barreno, Horta and Costa, New Portuguese Letters
(1975)

• all the shooting it also me drives crazy, and
  all I want to do is get out of there (242).
• lost a leg and is in the hospital and I dont
  know whats going to become of him when he goes
  back home to Carvalhal, because you need two legs
  to till land and thats the only thing he knows
  how to do because hes never been trained to do
  anything else and hes in such despair over the
  whole thing that he keeps crying all day and all
  night long and the only thing hell talk about is
  whats happened to him (293).

12
Barreno, Horta and Costa, New Portuguese Letters
(1975)

• everybody that gets sent down here gets scared
  and we never get over it (294).
• Ive seen lots of my pals all hunched over
  vomiting and falling to the ground as white as a
  sheet and we have to drag them along by brute
  force to drag them out of there (294).
• the African question, source of all this
  dissension, and all these separations (259).

13
Barreno, Horta and Costa, New Portuguese Letters
(1975)

• has gone off to fight in a war (152).
• hes going to sign up for a job in France
  (151).
• There are dead fish floating down the Caima and
  you cant even wash clothes in it because of the
  stench and even animals dont drink out of it
  (151).
• really need one because wool clothes like other
  things necessary to live comfortably are of good
  quality here and not much more expensive than
  they are back there (291).
• This is a big country and anybody who gets used
  to living here never gets used to living anyplace
  else. I remember all the misery I saw in
  Portugal (292).

14
Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, Empire, Colonial
Wars and Post-colonialism (2002)

• many Portuguese discovered an emptying of the
  traditional centre, that is, of the metropolitan
  space (133).

15
Elleke Bohemer, Colonial and Postcolonial
Literature (1995)

• along with the imperialist ethos inculcated in
  public schools, explorer and adventure tales
  performed the necessary service of informing
  Britons what it was like to be abroad in the
  colonies (31).

16
Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, Empire, Colonial
Wars and Post-colonialism (2002)

• In line with other policies promoted by the
  Estado Novo to advertise and mediate the
  Portuguese world, special attention was given to
  literature (162).
• was marginal and never captured the literary
  imaginary (162).

17
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Entre Prospero e
Caliban (2001)

• emigrant, rather than a colonizer, even in his
  own colonies (42).

18
Barreno, Horta and Costa, New Portuguese Letters
(1975)

• Women and blacks are also turning up
  nowadays as workers on road-construction projects
  and as city street sweepers (274).

19
Patrick Chabal, Angola and Mozambique The
Weight of History (2001)

• working population was scattered in
  different British colonies and in South Africa
  (225).
• Mozambique remained intimately dependent on the
  revenues remitted by labourers in South Africa or
  Rhodesia (224).

20
Manuel Ferreira, No reino de Caliban I (1988)

• An archipelago afflicted by the tragic lack of
  rain, the cyclical crises devastate tens of
  thousands of lives, weakened by centuries of
  chronic famines. These famines, with their
  consequent economic depressions, give rise to
  mass waves of emigration, first to North America,
  then to Angola, Mozambique and the plantations of
  São Tomé, nowadays to Portugal, Holland, France,
  Germany, and beyond (69).

21
Jorge Barbosa, O destino ignorado

• What has become of her for whom I made
• my romantic sonnets,
• my well measured sonnets?
• Maybe shes in Argentina
• Maybe in Bissau
• Maybe in Dakar

22
Tacalhe, Emigrante

• Anonymous passengers
• All with the same name.
• We are bodies strolling
• In the white cities
• With absent souls.

23
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Entre Prospero e
Caliban (2001)

• The difference of Portuguese colonialism must
  necessarily give rise to the difference of
  post-colonialism in the Portuguese-speaking
  world. Post-colonialism, in its manifestation as
  an intellectual current ..., is basically an
  Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, and takes British
  colonialism as its founding reality (30).

24
Bill Ashcroft, Post-colonial Transformation (2001)

• The place of a diasporic persons belonging may
  have little to do with spatial location, but be
  situated in family, community, in those symbolic
  features which constitute a shared culture, a
  shared ethnicity or system of belief, including
  nostalgia for a distant homeland. It is when
  place is least spatial, perhaps, that it becomes
  most identifying (125).

25
Ali Behdad, Global Disjunctures, Diasporic
Differences, and the New World (Dis-)Order (2000)

• While many postcolonial artists, writers, and
  theoreticians celebrate the massive immigration
  of the twentieth century as a hybridizing
  phenomenon that eradicates monolithic notions of
  identity, many underclass immigrants find their
  displacing movements and liminal conditions
  anything but salutary (402).
• who have been the target of xenophobic and
  nativist attacks both in cases where they have
  socially and economically succeeded in host
  countries for example, Southeast Asians in
  Africa, Asians in California, or Chinese in
  Malaysia and where they have held the least
  desirable and low-income jobs such as Turks in
  Germany, North Africans in France, or Latinos in
  Southern California (Behdad 402).

26
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Entre Prospero e
Caliban (2001)

• The Portuguease were never able to comfortably
  settle within the originary space-time of the
  European Prospero. They lived within that
  space-time as if they were internally displaced
  into symbolic regions that did not belong to them
  and where they did not feel at ease. They were
  the object of humiliation and celebration, of
  stigma and complacency, but always with the
  distance of someone who is not totally
  contemporaneous of the space-time occupied.
  Forced to play the game of modern binaries, they
  found it difficult to know to which side they
  belonged. Neither Prospero nor Caliban, they were
  left with the liminary and the border, with
  inter-identity as their originary identity (54).

27
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Entre Prospero e
Caliban (2001)

• The post-colonial aura, the celebration of
  diaspora and the value attached to the aesthetics
  of hybridity tend to disguise the real social
  conflicts in the which emigrant or diasporic
  groups are involved, and always in positions of
  power that are unfavourable to them (37).

28
Graça Capinha, A magia da tribo (2001)

• the total lack of attention paid to the forms of
  culture produced by Portuguese emigrants, a fact
  of which the emigrants themselves have always
  been critical (137).
• I ask myself whether this may be linked to the
  fact that these are localisms whose status is
  given by a centre that allowed them a prestigious
  globalization? And whether, on the contrary, the
  subaltern image of Caliban ... which the
  recognition (inconvenient, it seems) of the
  existence of Portuguese emigrants seems to
  reinforce in Portugals national identity
  continues to be so unprestigious that we prefer
  to continue talking about the culture of other
  groups, thereby erasing the culture of our own
  emigrants scattered throughout the world? (137)