Description
Book SynopsisAn Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM.
Empire Found: Racial Identities and Coloniality in Twenty-First Century Portuguese Popular Cultures examines how the discourses and narratives of Portuguese imperial exceptionalism and Portuguese racial identity, developed during the last centuries of Portuguese settler colonialism continue to inform an array of cultural production and consumption in the four decades since decolonization. By examining a range of contemporary popular cultural production (literature, football, musical production, and celebrity culture) in critical conversation with intellectual production of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
Empire Found examines how narratives of Portuguese racial hybridity and indeterminacy operate alongside ongoing structures of coloniality and white supremacy in the realms of cultural production. I argue that these implied or overt historical dialogues carried out through cultural production are integral to the very reproduction of the Portuguese nation-state apparatus, as well as its racial structures and claims to whiteness in the wake of decolonization and marginal integration into the European Union.
Trade Review"Daniel F. Silva’s book will make an important, innovative, and much needed contribution in the field of Lusophone Studies and beyond. This original book interrogates Portugal’s historical depths of historical, linguistic, symbolic and political ties to its former colonies and the meaning of these articulations for the country’s post-imperialism and current notions of Portuguese cultural identity."
Sandra Sousa, University of Central Florida
Table of ContentsIntroduction
1. Portuguese Whiteness and Racial Ambiguity in Intellectual Thought during Empire
2. Post-Imperial Orientalism and Portuguese Claims to Late Capitalist Whiteness in José Rodrigues dos Santos’s Mystery Thrillers
3. Football, Empire, and Racial Capitalism in Portugal
4. Color Games: Anti-Blackness, Racial Plasticity, and Celebrity Culture
5. Latin Reinventions: Contemporary Portuguese Singers,
Latinidad, and Latinx Musical Forms
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
