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

2002; Oxford University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/dsp.2011.0031

1911-1568

Tim Sieber,

Caribbean and African Literature and Culture

Composing Lusophonia:Multiculturalism and National Identity in Lisbon's 1998 Musical Scene R. Timothy Sieber1 (bio) R. Timothy Sieber Department of Anthropology University of Massachusetts Boston R. Timothy Sieber R. Timothy Sieber is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the U of Massachusetts Boston. He is the co-editor of Achieving Against the Odds: How Academics Become Teachers of Diverse Students (Temple UP, 2001); and Children and Their Organizations: Investigations in American Culture (G.K. Hall, 1981). His journal articles include "Remembering Vasco da Gama: Contested Histories and the Cultural Politics Of Nation-Building in Lisbon, Portugal," Identities (2001); and "Anthropology, United States Culture, and the Public," Reviews in Anthropology (1992). Notes 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. 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...