Women Writing Portuguese Colonialism in Africa Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures Series Editors L. Elena Delgado, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Niamh Thornton, University of Liverpool Series Editorial Board Jo Labanyi, New York University Chris Perriam, University of Manchester Paul Julian Smith, CUNY Graduate Center This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary hispanic and lusophone cultures and writing. The volumes published in Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments that have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary hispanic and lusophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture. 9 Bruno Carvalho, Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro (from the 1810s Onward) 10 Javier Krauel, Imperial Emotions: Cultural Responses to Myths of Empire in Fin-de-Siècle Spain 11 Luis Moreno-Caballud, translated by Linda Grabner, Cultures of Anyone: Studies on Cultural Democratization in the Spanish Neoliberal Crisis 12 H. Rosi Song, Lost in Transition: Constructing Memory in Contemporary Spain 13 Andrés Zamora, Featuring Post-National Spain: Film Essays 14 Paul Julian Smith, Dramatized Societies: Quality Television in Spain and Mexico 15 Joan Ramon Resina, The Ghost in the Constitution: Historical Memory and Denial in Spanish Society 16 José Colmeiro, Peripheral Visions/Global Sounds: From Galicia to the World 17 Regina Galasso, Translating New York: The City’s Languages in Iberian Literatures 18 Daniel F. Silva, Anti-Empire: Decolonial Interventions in Lusophone Literatures 19 Luis I. Prádanos, Postgrowth Imaginaries: New Ecologies and Counterhegemonic Culture in Post-2008 Spain 20 Liz Harvey-Kattou, Contested Identities in Costa Rica: Constructions of the Tico in Literature and Film 21 Cecilia Enjuto-Rangel, Sebastiaan Faber, Pedro García-Caro, and Robert Patrick Newcomb, eds, Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa Women Writing Portuguese Colonialism in Africa ANA PAULA FERREIRA LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS First published 2020 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2020 Ana Paula Ferreira The right of Ana Paula Ferreira to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-78962-231-7 cased ISBN 978-1-78962-824-1 epdf Typeset in Borges by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster To my parents, who left in the late 1960s. And to my brothers, who stayed and endured. E Próspero morreu Sem ter morrido Que as magias que fez Nos deixaram ainda descendência. (And Prospero died Without having passed away Since the spells that he made Have still left us descendants.) Ana Luísa Amaral (2011: 50) Contents Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 Women’s Education, Nation and Late Empire 15 Liberalism, Civilization and the Education of Women: Excluding Women from Politics 19 The Uneducated Bourgeois Woman as Symptom of National Decadence 23 Feminist Defenses of Women’s Education and Republican Nationalism 34 2 Colonial Literature and Women: Variations on a Theme 47 Colonial Propaganda and Women’s Difference 49 “Good Homemakers” for the Imperial Nation 53 The African Native Between Colonial Fetish and Anti-colonial Symptom 62 The Authority of Feminine Experience: Women Writers for “Suffering Souls” 70 3 “Making Empire Respectable”: Between Miscegenation and Lusotropicalism 79 I. From Complicity to Opposition 82 Fleeing National Decadence: The Conversion Narratives of Maria Lamas 82 The “Problem” of Miscegenation in the Portuguese Colonies 86 Maria Archer’s Miscegenation Melodramas 90 viii Women Writing Portuguese Colonialism in Africa II. From Lusotropicalism to Anti-colonialism 93 Gilberto Freyre’s Modern thinking on “Race” for an Outmoded Colonialism 93 Maria da Graça Freire’s Cautionary Tale of Lusotropicalism 96 Maria Archer in Brazil: Turning Imperial Propaganda Against Colonialism 101 4 The Coloniality of Gender and the Colonial War 109 Women and the Colonial War 113 New Portuguese Letters and the Coloniality of Gender 119 Testifying to the Trauma of the Colonial War 124 Post-colonial Reflections on the Instrumentalization of “Love” 130 5 Lusotropicalist Entanglements in the Post-colonial Metropole 141 I. “Racists are the Others”? 144 II. Feminist Stories of Racial Entanglement 150 What’s in a Name? Intertextuality as a Mnemonic Device 150 A Social Contract of Exclusions 154 Calling It Like It Is: Racial Apartheid 157 III. The Untold Stories of EXPO ’98 162 Conclusion 169 Works Cited 175 Index 199 Acknowledgments Acknowledgments lthough the writing of the present book would not have been possible A if it were not for research begun in the early years of my career, what finally brought it to fruition were the incentives that the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota has offered me. In addition to funding, I was awarded semester-long leave periods in between administrative appointments as Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies and subsequently as Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities. In between, I was honored with the Samuel Russell Chair in the Humanities, which enabled me to travel sometimes twice a year to carry out research at the National Library of Portugal in Lisbon, where all of my primary sources and some of the secondary ones are located. I am truly grateful to the deans and colleagues at Minnesota who have supported and encouraged my work. Many of the ideas and partial studies that eventually saw their way into this book were first presented as invited lectures and conference papers in a number of universities in the US and abroad. One of those lectures was the origin of Chapter 5; a shorter initial version was first published in a collection of essays edited by Hilary Owen and Anna Klobucka. My heartfelt thanks to them as well as to other friends in Portuguese Studies—the late Fernando Arenas, Paulo de Medeiros, Lídia Jorge, Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, Maria Manuel Lisboa, Adriana Martins, Philip Rothwell, Ana Luísa Amaral, Pedro Schacht Pereira, Livia Appa, Josiah Blackmore and Charles Perrone, to name a few—who over the years have hosted me, organized conferences and workshops and given me the opportunity to share my work and learn from their own and that of others. I hope that the final product does not disappoint them. Greg Membrez reminds me every day that doing research is a joy that need not be connected with academia. I thank him for his love and support. Introduction Introduction ore than a decade after the onset of democracy in Portugal on April M 25, 1974 and the process of decolonization that followed a memory boom began to appear in Portuguese culture. It favored the still living memories of the last period of empire, beginning with those of the military, who had served in the war waged by the Salazar/Caetano dictatorship against the liberation struggle going on in three African colonies between 1961 and 1974.1 By the end of the 2000s, the culture of memory was associated with the narratives of so-called retornados, between five and seven hundred thousand former colonists and their families who fled mostly from Angola and Mozambique between 1974 and 1975.2 Considering the unstable, volatile conjuncture of the recently won democracy, a surprising feat by the very military whose job was defending the five hundred-year empire, it is unsurprising that individual memories failed to amount to a collective narrative about the recent past.3 As media, literary, visual and ever multiplying academic discourse returned to that “end without a future” (Pitta 2010), colonial history was ignored, as if all that mattered began with the collapse of the empire. Despite the editorial and academic success garnered by fictional memories authored by the daughters of former colonists, little is known about those who preceded their writing about the entanglement of gender and colonialism across the twentieth century. How were “women” and “colonialism” discursively constructed from the geographical, temporal and existential distance of a metropolitan place of return imposing writing and reflection? The present book did not originate as a reaction to the erasure of the not-so-immediate past by the “memorialist obsession connected to the end of empire” (Peralta 2011a). When beginning a project on issues of representation of history in the fiction of Lídia Jorge (1946–), I often found myself wondering if, aside from the authors of the famous Novas cartas portuguesas (1972—New Portuguese Letters [1975]), women from previous generations had not written about the dictatorship and/or colonialism. 2 Women Writing Portuguese Colonialism in Africa My research into histories of literature and reference materials found in US libraries led me to the National Library of Portugal, where I spent the greater part of three summers reading relevant primary and secondary sources, including period literature.4 Directly or indirectly, many authors suggested that the problem with Portuguese colonialism in Africa until about the 1950s was a dearth not only of settlers but also of women who were appropriately conscious of their colonialist or civilizational mission. This type of criticism reappears with sarcasm in post-colonial narratives (e.g. Jorge 1988 and Figueiredo 2009).5 Meanwhile, Lídia Jorge’s A costa dos murmúrios (1988—The Murmuring Coast 1995) was on its way to becoming the privileged site for colonial memory limited to women’s involvement in the colonial war (Ribeiro 2004).