Maria do Carmo Picarra – författare

The filmography representing the ‘Portuguese Orient’ during the Estado Novo (1933–1974) is scarce and late, employing a simplified Luso- tropicalist rhetoric that repeatedly actualises the myth of a vast, long-lost, territory. This book examines the impact of cinematographic representations of the former Portuguese territories in the Orient on socio-cultural memories and narrative identities, through a critical exhumation of the archives and analysis of existing filmography. The analysis reveals that films of the ‘Portuguese Orient’ depict this imagined community with a certain degree of vagueness. This is largely a consequence of the prolonged disintegration of the metropolis’ relationship with this imagined community, a relationship that was mainly based on projections (about their alleged Portuguese identity) and ruins.

This book aims to explore the multiple ways in which Portuguese colonialism in former “Portuguese Asia” has been imagined.  It focuses primarily on how Estado Novo (1933–1974), the longest-running European dictatorship, “imagined” these territories and peoples. Images played a pivotal role in the exercise of colonial power, propagating established ideas and portraying a colonial reality entirely from a Western perspective. Scarce existing studies rarely acknowledge the need to differentiate between the specificities glossed over by Luso-tropicalist (and Luso-orientalists) discourse. Despite their propagandistic nature and their impact on the socio-cultural memories and narrative identities of the former Portuguese territories in Asia, visual representations of colonialism have largely remained unquestioned. By analysing the impact of such representations in cinema, photography and literature, among other media, the book aims to distinguish between the circumstances of “Portuguese India”, Macau and Timor while also considering anti-(post)colonial ruptures and persistences.