Book Review: Martins, Leonor Pires (2012). "Um império de papel. Imagens do colonialismo português na imprensa periódica ilustrada (1875-1940)". Lisboa: Edições 70 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Visualizing Portuguese Power: Between Imperial Agenda and Agency of the Image
2017
Images have always played a vital role in political communication and in the visualization of power structures and hierarchies. They gain even more importance in situations where non-verbal communication prevails: In the negotiation processes between two (or more) different cultures, the language of the visual is often thought of as the most effective way to acquaint (and overpower) the others with one's own principles, beliefs, and value systems. Scores of these asymmetrical exchange situations have taken place in the Portuguese overseas empire since its gradual expansion in the 16th century. This book offers new insights into the broad and differentiated spectrum of functions images could assume in political contexts in those areas dominated by the Portuguese in early modern times. How were objects and artifacts staged and handled to generate new layers of meaning and visualize political ideas and concepts? And what were the respective reasons, means, and effects of the visualization of Portuguese power and politics? Images have always played a vital role in political communication and in the visualization of power structures and hierarchies. They gain even more importance in situations where non-verbal communication prevails: In the negotiation processes between two (or more) different cultures, the language of the visual is often thought of as the most effective way to acquaint (and overpower) the others with one's own principles, beliefs, and value systems. Scores of these asymmetrical exchange situations have taken place in the Portuguese overseas empire since its gradual expansion in the 16th century. This book offers new insights into the broad and differentiated spectrum of functions images could assume in political contexts in those areas dominated by the Portuguese in early modern times. How were objects and artifacts staged and handled to generate new layers of meaning and visualize political ideas and concepts? And what were the respective reasons, means, and effects of the visualization of Portuguese power and politics?
History y Comunicación Social, 2021
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Portugal undertook in its mainland and colonial territories an ambitious modernising programme based on technoscientific grounds. From the late 1870s onwards, such programme was widely advertised in Occidente, the most important illustrated journal of the time that published several drawings of original photographs. In this paper, I will analyse the imagery based on authentic photography related to technoscientific activities in Portugal and its colonies, using a methodology that combines semiotics with photojournalistic analysis. I claim that Occidente, by publishing drawings of photos, was crucial to create an image of Portugal as a modern, technoscientific, and imperial nation, before the development of halftone printing and photojournalism.
Journal of Modern European History, 2018
Re-reading the Photographic Archive: The Propagandistic Staging of the Portuguese Estado Novo in the Braga District The article focuses on visual representations of political propaganda in a local context in the early years of the Estado Novo. Braga, the city of the military coup of 28 May 1926, became nationally famous because of its symbolic value, profusely exploited by the government and the local elites. By means of thick description of iconographic material, this study analyses the use of photography in terms of symbolic materialisation, within the processes of circulation and reception of aesthetic and artistic codes fostered and spread by the «politics of spirit».
Comunicação e Sociedade , 2016
This paper analyses films and documentaries produced in Portugal based or inspired on the former African colonies. During the Estado Novo, the creation of a positive image of the “empire” and of the colonial policy led to the prohibition of films that depicted physical abuse of African-origin individuals, the struggle between “white” (colonisers) and “black” (colonised), movements that fought for the ascension of the Afro-American population in the U.S.A. or exalted pacifist or antimilitarist concepts. Many documentaries emphasise Africa’s potential (natural and human). Some deal with the creation of structures that would allow the education and evangelization of the African people, while others try to portray its “uses and customs”. Others show evidence of the African people’s work strength in the construction of a promising future. That work is always guided by the “white”, that is, the technical knowledge of the “white” is added to the strength of the African. Africans are represented as examples of a unified whole (they are all called “indígenas”), but there is an attempt to identify distinctive characteristics between them. Images that denote an idea of modernization, in cities such as Luanda or Lourenço Marques, overshadow the “colonised”. These films are often a tool of propaganda rather than a means of information, or an ethnographical document, and their objective is to convey a colonial conscience.
The pervasiveness of images of black women's unclothed bodies in the Portu-guese colonial visual archive from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s—in photographic postcards, propaganda leaflets, colonial exhibition ephemera or as illustrations in newspapers—demonstrates that the gendered and racialized body of (unnamed) women was a powerful trope of colonial hegemony. The Portuguese colonial context, similar to other colonial contexts, reveals the banal-ization of the practice of white men photographing black colonized women. Is resistance or participation in the " event of photography " possible for these photographed women? This article will discuss some of the issues and challenges of dealing with these images through specific case studies: postcards of semi-naked African women between the ethnographic and the erotic; images of women exhibited in colonial exhibitions; private photographs of Portuguese soldiers next to African women; but also the counter narratives to an hegemonic visuality.
Imperial Propaganda and the Representation of Otherness in Portugal in the Early Modern Times
This paper will try and investigate to what extent the visual representation of elements connected to its colonies served to legitimize Portuguese power in the first half of the 16th century. Was the representation of the exotic something exceptional, or was it a fundamental brick in the visual construction of the Portuguese empire? Was the quotation of these foreign elements meant to merely signify the universality of Portugal’s power, or were there other connotations to these borrowings? Did artists intend to embrace otherness or to praise the nation by portraying its conquests? In doing so, the paper will also deal with the examination of the key word “Manueline” in Portuguese art history and historiography.
The portuguese colonial press and the Estado Novo
Revista Diadorim, 2019
This essay discusses the Boletim Geral das Colónias (General Bulletin of the Colonies), which was renamed and continued to appear as the Boletim Geral do Ultramar (General Bulletin of the Overseas), as an informative vehicle about the field of art and letters during the Portuguese Colonial Empire. Based on the monthly publication of the section 'Arts and Letters,' which began in February 1948, this study explores the sudden integration of a space dedicated to literary and cultural divulgation into such a publication. It furtherly discusses the form in which it was transmitted to the public; the advantages of this type of divulgation within the Portuguese colonial space; the dynamics between center and the peripheries; and, in a wider sense, how this space contributed to the construction of a cultural imaginary about the colonies and about the colonizer.
2017
Imperial Portuguese imagery unveils three discursive tropes as primordial signs of the representation of an idea of empire-the cross, the crown and the sphere. These three signs embody the representation of the Portuguese monarchy since the remote 16th century and play a role in the building of an Orientalism in Portugal. Having in mind the notion of Orientalism as an ongoing conceptual building, I will approach the first narrative images of Macao that emerge in reports about the Portuguese presence in that space. My focus will lie on Duarte Barbosa's and Tomés Pires' texts, and on Fernão Lopes de Castanheda's and Gaspar da Cruz's chronicles, in order to show how space summons the imagery of a historical time. In these texts, we are not yet before an idea of progress, since they only confront the different, either incorporating or rejecting it.