Bringing Slavery into the Light in Postcolonial Portugal
2020; Berghahn Books; Volume: 8; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.3167/armw.2020.080105
ISSN2049-6737
Autores Tópico(s)African history and culture studies
ResumoIn 2009, in Lagos, Portugal, the remains of 158 bodies of fifteenth-century enslaved Africans were unearthed. In 2016, Lagos City Council inaugurated a slavery-themed exhibition in collaboration with the Portuguese Committee of UNESCO’s Slave Route Project. Through an analysis of the exhibition’s rhetoric and poetics, I argue that the former is yet another instance of Lusotropicalism, a theoretical construct developed by Gilberto Freyre throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s to support the construct of Brazil as a racial democracy, and appropriated by Portugal to support the “benign” character of its colonial system. As a consequence, slavery and Portugal’s role in the transatlantic slave trade, although apparently brought into the light in this exhibition, are in fact hidden in plain sight because both the rhetorical and poetic devices at play conspire to evade addressing the colonial order and its historical consequences, both past and present.
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