Diaspora
Volume 11, Number 2, Fall 2002
Special
Issue on Portugueseness, Migrancy and Diasporicity
Special
Issue Editors:
Andrea Klimt, University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth
Stephen Lubkemann, George Washington University
Argument
across the Portuguese-Speaking World: A Discursive Approach to
Diaspora
Andrea Klimt and Stephen Lubkemann
There is no doubt that the Portuguese are widely dispersed. The histories, encounters, and conditions that have led to this dispersal are, however, highly varied and paradoxical. Once the center of a global empire, Portugal now stands at the periphery of Europe; both the earliest and the last Western colonial power, it was also arguably the weakest; the source of an emigration diaspora that spans the globe, it has become more recently the destination of immigrants from Africa, South America, and Asia (Baganha; Costa-Pinto). What is particularly intriguing and challenging about how “Portugueseness” is used in the world is the fact that colonialism, emigration and immigration, and nation building have been inextricably intertwined and historically overlapping processes.
Composing
Lusophonia: Multiculturalism and National Identity in Lisbon's 1998
Musical Scene
R. Timothy Sieber
Following Portugal's post-1974 transition to democracy and entry into the European Union in 1986, state reformulations of national identity increasingly stressed Portugal's expertise in multicultural, especially international, affairs. By the 1990s, almost all discourses of national culture, history, and identity asserted Portuguese people's historic facility in promoting dialogue and communication among the world's cultures and nations and emphasized a history of mediation and brokerage, cross-cultural exchange and fusion, hybrid forms, and multiculturalism. Political and cultural leaders pointed to the existence of a wider lusophone or Portuguese-speaking world, stretching across Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia, as concrete evidence of past and continuing Portuguese global leadership in this domain.
The
Moral Economy of Portuguese Postcolonial Return
Stephen C. Lubkemann
In 1974, Portugal's 25 April revolution and the rapid decolonization that followed ushered over half a million residents from the former African colonies into the country within little over a year's time. Although all these “decolonization immigrants” (Smith) were termed “retornados” (literally translated as “returnees”), almost 40 per cent had actually been born in Africa and had never set foot in Portugal. Based on almost two years of field research, conducted intermittently between 1987 and 1996 in “Olival,”1 this article explores the social trajectories of these decolonization immigrants, as they sought to negotiate a problematic entry into the Portuguese imagined community (Anderson) between 1976 and 1996. It traces the transformation of retornado identity from prominent public signifier of moralized and racialized social exclusion to private signifier of prestige.
Playing Portuguese: Constructing Identity in Malaysia's Portuguese
Community
Margaret Sarkissian
This paper is concerned with one of the less familiar outposts of the Portuguese diaspora—Malaysia.1 Almost five centuries after the great Portuguese seafarer Afonso de Albuquerque sailed into Malacca, there is still a small village on the outskirts of the city known as the “Portuguese Settlement” (Kampung Portugis or Kampung Serani2 in Malay). Its residents are described variously as Malaysian Portuguese, Portuguese Eurasians, Luso-Malays, Orang Serani (in Malay; “ Serani people”), or simply (in their own language) as jenti Kristang, the Kristang (“Christian,” i.e., Catholic) people. I will concentrate primarily on the community's performing tradition because it is through performance that the community has made its mark within the nation. Apart from their language, which they call papia Kristang (a form of Portuguese Creole that functions as an internal marker of community membership), and their religious faith (shared quietly with other Catholic Malaysians, mostly of Chinese or Indian origin), it is through music, dance, and the costumes worn for performance that members of the community represent themselves to the outside world as Portuguese descendants.
Identities and Imagined Homelands: Reinventing the Azores in Southern
Brazil
João Leal
In 1995, I attended the Fourth Congress of Azorean Communities. The Congress was a major event in Azorean political life.2 It gathered together hundreds of representatives of Azorean migrant organizations in the headquarters of the Azorean regional parliament on the island of Faial and was attended by members of the Azorean government, including its president, Madruga da Costa. Rather than making a simple gesture of deference towards the representatives of Azorean migrants, both the location chosen for the Congress and its attendance by important members of the Azorean political elite made a statement about the importance of the Azorean diaspora. In fact, since 1978, the diaspora has been viewed by the major Azorean political parties as a critically important part of the Azorean community, considered as a “people,” including not only those Azoreans actually living in the Azores, but also the Azorean migrants and their descendents living outside the archipelago.
Towards a Cartography of Portugueseness: Challenging the Hegemonic
Center
Edite Noivo
Hundreds of thousands of Portuguese-born individuals and their descendants, permanently displaced across continents, represent themselves in both ethnic and diasporic terms. They speak at one and the same time of attachments to their original homeland, of transnational loyalties, and of a bonding with their new homes. In their efforts to interweave emotions, memories, and images of their homeland with the experiences in and attachments to their new geographical and cultural contexts, they articulate conceptualizations of diasporicity that increasingly challenge monolithic versions of “Portugueseness,” which until now have been produced exclusively in Portugal. While theoretical debates on the inclusive–exclusive character of diaspora continue to unfold (see Tölölyan; Safran; Schnapper), many relocated groups have already appropriated the term “diaspora” in formulating their own identity discourses. In using old attachments to forge new identities, the Portuguese-born abroad are composing new deterritorialized versions of what it means to be Portuguese in a world of expansive transnationalism.
Investigating Portugueseness: Reflections on Recent Ethnographic
Approaches
Andrea Klimt
The works under consideration in this essay all explore identities, relationships, and ways of life that have intersected, in one way or another, with Portugal's intertwined history of emigration, empire, and nation-making. Two of them—Portuguese Women in Toronto: Gender, Immigration, and Nationalism, by Wenona Giles, and The Portuguese in Canada: From the Sea to the City, edited by Carlos Teixeira and Victor M.P. Da Rosa—focus on a relatively recent component of Portugal's diaspora. The other two—D'Albuquerque's Children: Performing Tradition in Malaysia's Portuguese Settlement, by Margaret Sarkissian, and “Brazilians in Portugal, Portuguese in Brazil: Constructions of Sameness and Difference,” by Bela Feldman-Bianco—explore contemporary manifestations of Portugal's history as a colonial power.
