Consensus and Debate in Salazar's Portugal: Visual and Literary Negotiations of the National Text, 1933-1948 (review)

The impressive thing about this study is that, in an understated way, it sets out a perspective on the constitution of nationality during Portugal's fascist years that is analytically unique. Not just for English readers—though the book is a welcome addition to the growing body of English-language work on twentieth-century Portugal—but for readers tout court.

Sapega's goal is to examine "specific images and metaphors of collective … identity that the Salazar government used to ensure the consent of the national populace" through brief case studies of "unique and successful ways of responding to the challenging conditions faced by writers and artists during the first decades of the Estado Novo" (3). Or perhaps one should refer to dual "goals," since the book involves a movement, implicit when not explicit, back and forth between the state culture-construction initiatives signaled in the first half of the preceding quotation and the artistic "responses" pointed to in its second half, with each pole continuously illuminating, and constructing, the other. After a historical introduction and statement of goals, the first substantive chapter, "Staging memory: 'The Most Portuguese Village in Portugal' and the Exposition of the Portuguese World" (9-45), examines two instances of state culture-creation. Then come three chapters, each focused on a "response" to the regime's general attitude and as well to various of its specific actions. Those chapters are ch. 2, "Between Modernity and Tradition: José de Almada Negreiros's Visual Commentaries on Popular Experience" (47-85), ch. 3, "Family Secrets: Irene Lisboa's Critique of 'God, Pátria, and Family'" (87-114), and ch. 4, "Imperial Dreams and Colonial Nightmares: Baltasar Lopes's Ambivalent Embrace of Lusotropicalism" (115-43). A short, generalizing conclusion follows (145-52). The book contains 23 black-and-white photos of objects dealt with in the substantive chapters, and the basic bibliography, the great bulk of which is available only in Portuguese and is drawn upon to good advantage throughout, is reproduced at book's end.

The first chapter sets up the principal reference points for the state-initiatives pole of the duality. In exploring the initiatives mentioned in its title, it analyzes in detail the ingredients of the internally-contradictory "reactionary modernism" (13) that provided the political basis for the regime's studied "staging" of public memory. In the process, the chapter draws on the critical work currently being done on public memory and the constitution and functioning of memory sites, to which it constitutes a contribution.

Chapter 2 examines the complex negotiations (in all senses of the word) that took place around and within some of the public art of Almada Negreiros, poet, novelist, visual artist and public provocateur of futurist orientation. In the chapter, the author reads productively the complex interpenetration in Almada's work of representations of popular consciousness on the one hand and of state-favored tradition on the other and sees a progress in that work from ironic commentary on the state program to subtle resistance to it. The subsequent chapter deals with a figure in whom resistance is more immediately evident: the poet and prose writer Irene Lisboa. Sapega analyzes aspects of Lisboa's works as deconstructive of the vision of religiosity, nation, and, especially, of the traditional patriarchy that the regime promulgated. Moreover, she argues that, while demonstrating potential alternative narratives and daily-life counterexamples to state outlook, Lisboa also includes allusion to authorial presence in such a way as to suggest a stable locus of resistance. The final substantive chapter deals with the semiautobiographical novel Chiquinho by Cape Verdean poet, novelist and linguist Baltasar Lopes. It suggests that, in depicting conditions in the Cape Verdes, the novel evidences the disparity between claims made within the imperialist dimension of Portuguese nationalist rhetoric and actual cultural conditions. In exploring what Lopes offers as a response to that disparity, Sapega points to a particular version of...