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2020-2 Contemporary mobilities in lusotopy: Questioning (post)imperial borders

Guest editors

  • Irène Dos Santos, CNRS, URMIS, Université de Paris Denis Diderot

  • Sónia Ferreira, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, FCSH, CRIA

In Imperial Migrations. Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World (Morier-Genoud & Cahen, Ed. 2013), the authors asked if the Portuguese empire had generated an autonomous social space for migration. Although their answer tends to be negative, the question remains whether there is a contemporary space for human mobilities based on sociocultural heritage and imaginations linked to the past of the Portuguese colonial empire.

A growing number of recent research projects focus on migratory flows between so-called ‘Lusophone’ countries (International Migration 2009; Trovão & Rosales 2010; Abadia et al. 2016; Fusco et al. 2018), viewed in some cases as a ‘migratory system’ (Baganha 2009). The latter is characterised by various centres connecting to a global migratory system (Gois & Marques 2009). Too often, however, the very category of ‘Lusophone’ and and the borders of ‘Lusophony’, both territorial and identitary, are still taken for granted, even though they reflect the persistence of a colonial ideology (Margarido 2000; Santos 2001; Vale de Almeida 2002; Cahen 2013; Ribeiro 2018; Cahen & Ferraz de Matos 2018, etc.). Studies analysing social class, ethno-racial and even gender relations show an interiorization of the power relations of colonisation in social interactions between migrant/mobile populations and settlement societies, as well as situations superseding the ‘colonial encounter’ (Feldman-Bianco 2001; Batalha 2004; Vala, Lopes, Lima 2008; Marques, Dias, Mapril 2005; Marques 2012; Alves 2015; Dos Santos 2016; Akesson 2018).

Beyond the issue of migration, to what extent do institutional narratives of Lusophony and the Lusophone worlds, reproduced by the media in particular (Ferreira 2016; Rosales 2018), shape social practices of mobility: migration/expatriation, student mobilities (Côrtes 2015), artistic mobilities (Vanspauwen 2012), political activism, as well as tourism associated with patrimonialisation of the Imperial past (Cardeira da Silva 2013; Peralta 2017) or ‘dark tourism’ (Asquith & Forsdick 2017)? Does their study reveal an ‘oecumene’ (Pina-Cabral 2010) — a contemporary global space with a heritage — of Portuguese (de)colonisation, characterised by a density of human and cultural circulation? What continuity and what socio-historical splits of the empire’s territorial borders (Bastos 2009; Hespanha, 2019) or its imaginations (Domingos 2016) do such mobilities allow us to question? What social, cultural, political and economic resources, what transnational links, what individual and collective memories and what imaginations motivate the choices of individual and groups migrating and/or circulating between these places, countries and beyond? How are these resources — objective and subjective — imbricated and reappropriated in contexts of mobility?

This issue aims to question the influence, or insignificance, of the various legacies of the Portuguese colonial empire, and their reappropriation at different scales of analysis, on contemporary mobilities. It also aims to bring together recent research based on empirical data from the human and social sciences focusing on a diversity of forms of contemporary spatial mobilities taken in their (post)imperial historicity. Its purpose is to analyse biographical and social trajectories, romantic relationships and mixed couples formed in a context of mobility, relationships in the workplace, artistic productions, consumption practices, relations between individuals and social groups with politics and a common past, in order to examine the territorial, cultural, ethno-racial boundaries and relationships of domination – and overcoming them – in so-called ‘Lusophone’ worlds. We are also looking for case studies using a comparatist approach to global post-imperial spaces, exploring the study of mobilities between competing former empires (Bastos, 2016-2021) or those of individuals from ‘Portuguese’ communities outside the empire’s formal boundaries (Hespanha 2019).

Anticipated themes of contributions:

  • professional mobilities on the scale of multinational companies from Portuguese-speaking countries, student mobilities and social relations – weddings, romantic relationships and sex, in particular – arising from interactions between these individuals and settlement societies studied;

  • in a socio-anthropological perspective, analysis of social, economic, political, cultural resources inherited and mobilised in such travel, and their reappropriation, including a ‘common’ language;

  • representations of the places associated with such mobilities, the categories used to designate them (places of origin, places of passage, places of return, etc.) and the affects to which they relate (nostalgia, rejection, etc.);

  • mobility as a mode of subjectivation of identity assignation and relations with painful and shared past experience: tourism and memorial practices and patrimonialisation linked to political exile (anticolonial struggle), in particular;

  • narratives of such mobilities, the circulation of objects and images (media, cinema, literary works), analysis of cultural and artistic productions crosscutting comparing both the subjectivation and cultural institutionalisation of ‘Lusophone’ worlds;

  • relationship between migration/mobilities and collective action: how it accompanies - and on what grounds - the creation of political organizations, practices of contestation or "remote" support from governments;

  • migratory policy between officially Portuguese-speaking countries and that conducted/envisaged within the CPLP (Community of Portuguese Language Countries);

  • interethnic relations between migrant/mobile post-colonial populations in so-called ‘Lusophone’ contexts, and between such populations in contexts deemed non-Lusophone;

  • epistemological and methodological reflexions questioning the contribution of mobility studies (‘mobility turn’) to explore the existence — effective or discursive — of a contemporary global lusotopy space.

Abstracts for articles (500 words) must be sent at the latest by 15 October 2019 to: irene.dossantos@cnrs.fr; sonia.ferreira@fcsh.unl.pt.

After acceptance of the abstracts, complete articles are expected by January 31, 2020.

Lusotopie publishes articles in French, Portuguese and English.

References cited

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Åkesson, L. 2018, Postcolonial migration to Angola. Migrants or Masters?, Basingstocke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Alves, M. F. 2015, “Memórias, Identidades e Representações Sociais dos Cabo-Verdianos no Rio de Janeiro”, in C. Natário, C. Bezerra, E. Carlos, R. Epifânio (eds), Errâncias de Um Imaginário, entre Brasil, Cabo-Verde e Portugal, Porto, Universidade do Porto: 321-336.

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