Teaching "Race" with a Gendered Edge

Chapter 5: Portugal and the Empire: Discourses and Practices on Raceand Gender

CHAPTER 5: Portugal and the Empire: Discourses and Practices on Race and Gender Elsa Peralta and Simone Frangella Grasping Portuguese colonial “exceptionalism” Portugal was the centre of an empire which spread over four continents and spanned nearly six centuries. It was the first and most enduring of the modern European colonial empires. It started in the early 15th century and lasted until 1974, when the fall of the dictatorship in Portugal led to the independence of the colonies in Africa, namely Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé e Príncipe, which were long fighting for independence . Formally, however, the Portuguese empire lasted until 20 December 1999, when Macau was handed over to China.The durability and importance of imperial history in Portuguese definitions of national identity make the empire a central category, mediating racial relations both in Portuguese colonial contexts and in various post-colonial settings. Central to the way these relations are ideologically conceived is the idea of miscigenação (miscegenation) as a special feature of Portuguese colonialism. In the course of the history of the Portuguese empire there were many instances of interracial marriage and sexual relations between the Portuguese and the colonised peoples,1 even if colonial relations were characterised, as always, by racial discrimination and asymmetry in power relations. Nevertheless, a position of exception is generally assumed regarding Portugal’s imperial history. This idea of exceptionalism relates to a general conception that Portuguese people have a special vocation for getting along and mingling with other peoples and that their colonialism, as compared with other European colonial experiences, was gentler, more peaceful and benevolent.2 Essential to such discourse, miscegenation is transformed into a chief rhetorical tool to differentiate Portuguese colonisation from other colonial experiences. 1 Francisco Bethencourt and Kirti Chaudhuri, eds., História da Expansão Portuguesa (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1998–9). 2 Eduardo Lourenço, “Retrato (póstumo) do Nosso Colonialismo Inocente I,” Critério 2 (1976): 8–11. 97 In this chapter we will look at the way in which the discourse on miscegenation was developed during the course of the Portuguese empire from an historical and empirical situation to be subsequently turned into a hegemonic discourse both in colonial and post-colonial times. We aim to reflect on the way practical historical and everyday conditions—as well as discourses of dominance based on race, gender, class and colonialism—produce subalternity, introducing the several layers of meanings it involved, such as subjugation, self-subjugation and agency. Finally, we argue that this concrete case study is a useful tool in teaching about colonial relations, as it problematises how racial and gender interactions intersect and are transformed in diverse periods of colonial rule, generating specific national ideologies, which also turn out to be particular post-colonial representations. Racial-gendered relations in imperial history After a first period covering the 15th and 16th centuries, marked by an evangelising impetus and a commercial expansionism towards the East, Brazil, with its sugar, slave trade and later gold, became the centre of the Portuguese colonial economy. Brazil was Portugal’s first true colonial settlement, absorbing a considerable number and variety of migrants from metropolitan Portugal.3 Widely perceived as a land of opportunity, Brazil was able to attract a great number of Portuguese people—mostly men, but also women—who then would found a colonial society based on the labour of slaves brought from the West African coast. A process of racial mixing was to emerge as a result of cultural and sexual intercourse mainly between white men and indigenous women at first, followed by black women slaves. Portuguese colonisation in American lands meant a rigid direct administration and a strong attempt by the Church and the State to impose moral, cultural and religious values from the metropolis. However, in practice the control was less efficient; they could not prevent the sexual intercourse that came into play, a consequence of the attempt to occupy and exploit the territory , of the scarcity of “white women” in the colonies (above all at the beginning of the colonial process), and of the demographic limitations of 3 Charles Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborn Empire, 1415–1825 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969). 98 Portugal. These two movements—one, moral and religious, and the other, more precarious and pragmatic—were at the basis of gender relations. Pluri-ethnic sex, slavery and concubinage constituted the essential tripod of sexual...