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Emerging in 1917 amidst the anxieties of World War I, the Cult of Our Lady of Fátima began with a vision witnessed by three shepherd children in rural Portugal. News of the apparition quickly spread, drawing hundreds, then thousands of pilgrims to the Cova da Iria. This potent symbol of faith soon transcended its origin, migrating in the form of venerated statues and dedicated shrines that sprouted across the globe. Particularly intertwined with Portuguese emigration, the cult's reach extended to former colonies in Africa and Asia ("Ultramar") and distant communities like Brazil. Statues of Our Lady became beacons of familiarity and solace, offering "homes away from home" for displaced populations. This essay focuses on the discourses surrounding the cult between the early 1930s and 1950s, exploring how Fátima served as a focal point for navigating the social, political, and cultural conflicts inherent in the emigration experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting in the 1880s, Portugal invested in constructing railways in its African colonies, Angola and Mozambique. The aim was both to solidify Portuguese presence in territories disputed by other imperial nations and to facilitate exploration of the resources that imperial policymakers assumed existed in the colonial hinterland. To promote the perception that Portugal was an imperial nation, hundreds of photographs recorded the construction, inauguration, and operation of these new railways. Using a semiotics approach, this article analyzes photographs from various sources in Portugal to show how they helped create a novel technological landscape, underscoring the domestication of the territory and the civilization of its inhabitants by European rule, thus promoting it as a land of opportunity for European settlers. This focus adds to the debate claiming that photography was a crucial tool of empire serving European colonialism and imperialism in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores, through a close reading of newspapers and publications connected to the Portuguese libertarian movement, anarchist discourses and practices around understandings of "race" in Portugal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A contribution is made both to studies of Lusophone anarchism as well as broader labour movement history where analyses of the interconnections between race and colonialism have been sparse. Portuguese anarchist understandings of race are placed within the context of broader ideas on internationalism within the anarchist movement, contemporary theories of the inheritance of racial characteristics and contestations against notions of nationhood and nationalism. The specific context of Portuguese colonialism and the development of anthropology in the country form the backdrop against which anarchist ideas are analysed. The article argues that while anarchism disrupted certain tropes within racial and colonialist discourse, it also reinforced some cultural categories and rigidified understandings of race, culture and social development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discoursively glocal architectures play a key role in today’s architectural norms and forms. This is also the case in Portugal where modern pedigreed architecture harnesses some form of local tradition and cultural reification as credentials. This article argues this is partly rooted in the cultural discourses developed within the post-war colonial project of the Portuguese dictatorship (Estado Novo), intersecting modernization with imperial reorganization, and in which architectural modernist ideals of autonomy and liberty played a direct role. The article contends the appropriation of these ideals needs to be considered in a double light: as a sign of progress for a professional elite and as a new mask for an old and violent system of inequality. The article explores the colonial infra-structuring of post-war architectural knowledge, questioning the role of “virgin” landscapes in re-creating professional practice rallied by colonial modernization. The article examines how ethnographic processes were integrated into architectural creation, inspiring “culturally committed” forms of “Portuguese” modernism and imperialism. Offering a critique and cultural debate of the entanglements between architecture, anthropology, nation and empire, the article aims to contribute to architecture’s political history and to debates on the role of modern spatial practices in the creation of racial categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the arrival of Portuguese colonialism to its present incarnation as the world's biggest gambling center, Macau has long made the most of its liminal position at China's edge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an ethnographic theorization of the relationship between naming, translation, and subject constitution via the analysis of forms of interpellation in colonial Angola. It engages critically with systemic/structural renderings of colonial society that portray social positions as oppositional to argue for a deconstructive approach attentive to historical disjunctions between naming and social positioning. Dwelling on core signifiers in Portuguese and Umbundu, the paper describes the iterative chain of substitutions through which subjects have been constituted, that is, reduced and transformed. For instance, how are the Umbundu status signifiers ocimbundu and ocindele reduced in their respective translations as "black" and "white"? How can translation both re-enact and challenge the constitution of racialized and ethnicized categories of difference? How is this related to transformations in Angolan history? The argument put forth challenges the conventional understanding of social categories in the context of Portuguese colonialism in Angola by arguing that the performativity of naming and translation constitutes subjects via both fixation and displacement. Therefore, the possibility of transformation does not lie in the intentional action of subjects, but in their capacity to operate within the fractures of the relationship between language and society by drawing on disjunctions between signifier and signified, names and social positioning, subjective constitution and sociopolitical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The defence of the Portuguese colonial empire's integrity has often been signalled by historians as one of the factors which justified the declaration of war against Germany, in March 1916, and Portugal's participation in the European theatre of operations, alongside its ally, Great Britain, from early 1917 onwards. This article seeks to analyse the ways in which the outbreak of the First World War was perceived by Portugal as an opportunity to regain the country's lost international role as an imperial power, it will also examine how the conflict was experienced in Mozambique, in order to explore Portugal's role in wartime Africa. The article will conclude if the military intervention contributed, or not, to sustain the narrative of the country's imperial mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The island of Ataúro, situated north of the capital of Timor-Leste, functioned as a prison island during the Portuguese colonial regime, more intensively from the 1920s onwards. During the Indonesian colonial period (1975-1999), the occupiers used the island to confine families of resistance members in open concentration camps, where hundreds of people died of hunger and malnutrition. In this paper, departing from an analysis of the memories and archival material on the former prisoners in Ataúro during the Indonesian occupation, I argue for the importance of telling and memorialising the histories of the island and people imprisoned there. Furthermore, I discuss memory and the colonial legacies, as some islands in the Pacific region remain territories deemed as repositories and detention sites for people fleeing from far away places marked by conflicts created by dictatorial and colonial regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an exploratory attempt to address the colonial ambivalence implicit in contemporary moving images in the Portuguese context. The postcolonial turn that emerged in the last decades in Portugal attests to an earnest attempt to problematise the nation's postcolonial condition, which in turn derives from a long-overdue admission that our contemporary societies were built from colonial plunder. Drawing heavily on the critique of Lusophony, I argue that this postcolonial turn is also a consequence of the need to inscribe the Portuguese national narrative within an increasingly global world arising from the subordination of culture to the "laws of the market". In addition, I argue that this post-colonial approach found in Portuguese contemporary visual culture is ambivalent since it tends to ignore the problem of the legitimacy and the speaking position of the artist and/or intellectual. The legitimacy problem -- of who speaks of and about others -- is often paradoxically disregarded in contemporary audiovisual productions that address the Portuguese colonial past and its postcolonial condition. In the same way, the intrinsic relationship between visual production and knowledge is ignored, and consequently, between visual production and power. In this way, I argue that colonial ambivalence continues to pervade cultural discourses and contemporary artistic practices today, even when such practices and discourses appear to articulate a postcolonial critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to analyse Appunti per un periplo dell'Africa (1954), a travel book written by Emilio Cecchi that narrates the writer's impressions and experiences in some Portuguese African colonies. The text is influenced by fascist propaganda, linked to imperialism, and shows the tendency to present African populations as the object of colonization. We consider the various stereotypes and images that Cecchi uses in the representation of the colonized people of the Portuguese territories in Africa, in particular in discourses focused on race, women, dance and the colonial system. It turns out that Cecchi's work is fully inserted into the ideological context of the early twentieth century, reaffirming a colonial discourse that supports the primacy of the civilized European over the primitive African and giving into the fascination for the exotic, typical of colonial literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An analysis of the poetic work Sangue Negro (2001) is proposed from discussions on ethics and aesthetics, based on propositions by Schiller (2002), Valcárcel (2005), Fanon (2005), and Walty (2018) to analyze political-ideological pretensions that echo in the plural voice of Noémia de Sousa. This writer is one of the pioneer voices of modern Mozambican poetry, which, in the mid-20th century, echoes resistance: her poems question social structures, repression against women, and, above all, the process of independence and political liberation of this Portuguese colony. In the context of the "new Mozambican poetry", the writer inaugurated her own diction, profoundly influencing her contemporaries. Noémia de Sousa's literary gesture presupposes the collective voice of Mozambique, whose sound echoes in the violent scenario split by colonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sebastião Coelho (1931-2002) was a radio announcer, independent broadcaster and disc producer, born to colonial settler parents in Nova Lisboa (currently Huambo, Angola) who contributed to the construction of a new sonorous Angolanness. In this paper, Sebastião Coelho's role in this process is discussed. Coelho's new sonorous Angolanness derives from the literary expression of the Angolan anti-colonial movement that emerged in the 1940s. We pro vide an account of how he used sound, radio and the respective corporative structures to oppose the colonial regime at the end of the Portuguese colonial empire hence contributing to build up a new sonorous Angolanness. Methodologically, research included examination of the Portuguese Political Police (PIDE) archives deposited at the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, with oral history, provided through in-depth interviews with Sebastião Coelho's relatives, as well as with documents written and published by the radio professional after Angolan's independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates how Portuguese leaders created historical representations celebrating Portuguese settlement as the supposed beginning of Angolan history. Accounts of Angolan history presented to the Angolan public in the 1930s–1950s deliberately represented Africans as heathens to be conquered and converted, with their presence often serving as an exuberant, exotic backdrop to Portuguese dignitaries. This cultural form of imperialism made use of both traditional and newer forms of commemoration to reinforce the image of benevolent colonialism. After Angolan nationalists launched a war for independence in 1961, Portugal’s colonial narrative shifted to emphasise the creation of a multiracial, modernising Angola. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the links between international law, race and colonial capitalism through the Spanish and Portuguese Conquests of the Americas. Turning to the early modern philosophers of the School of Salamanca, Bohrer argues that economic theories of emergent capitalism are deeply intertwined with the racial theories of colonial conquest. Moreover, through a close reading of these texts, and in particular of the texts of Francisco de Vitoria, this paper argues that the conceptions of international trade, commerce and travel at the heart of liberal notions of international law are themselves suffused with the logics of racism, colonisation, and capitalist accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the cold war, Afro-Asian leaders had been highly critical of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO) out-of-area initiatives. This article will focus on the Portuguese strategy to use the North Atlantic Council to pursue national, colonial interests in Asia and Africa. The solicitation of support from the USA constituted a key element in this diplomatic exchange. As a result, at Bandung, the leaders of the newly independent nations challenged not a specific European colonial empire, but transferred their outrage to the entire Atlantic Alliance. In the end, the promotion of colonial interests in the Atlantic Alliance led to several conflicts with the newly independent nations and a loss of face for the Western world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to offer another reading of the Portuguese civilising process in Africa on the basis of an analysis of a set of alternative sources and to explore the role of other educational configurations, beyond those of the public school and the religious missionary school, such as the civilising missions. With the creation of the Lay Civilising Missions in 1913, a new and totally lay conception of missionary work in the colonies was instituted. In the context of European colonialism, this configuration is distinguished as one of the most peculiar moments of republican affirmation in the governing of African territories dominated by the Portuguese. Through the analysis of the letters exchanged between the civilising agents, between Portugal and the African colonies, the author will try to analyse the arguments, strategies and tactics of government in terms of wills, inventions, programmes, acts and counter-acts, thus discussing the discontinuities between the programmes of governing at a distance and local practices. Methodologically speaking, looking at alternative source materials opens up a series of theoretical-conceptual possibilities, unveiling the tensions and contradictions embedded in the colonial encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sebastião Coelho (1931-2002) was a radio announcer, independent broadcaster and disc producer, born to colonial settler parents in Nova Lisboa (currently Huambo, Angola) who contributed to the construction of a new sonorous Angolanness. In this paper, Sebastião Coelho's role in this process is discussed. Coelho's new sonorous Angolanness derives from the literary expression of the Angolan anti-colonial movement that emerged in the 1940s. We pro vide an account of how he used sound, radio and the respective corporative structures to oppose the colonial regime at the end of the Portuguese colonial empire hence contributing to build up a new sonorous Angolanness. Methodologically, research included examination of the Portuguese Political Police (PIDE) archives deposited at the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, with oral history, provided through in-depth interviews with Sebastião Coelho's relatives, as well as with documents written and published by the radio professional after Angolan's independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]