Heritage(s) of Portuguese Influence: History, Processes, and Aftereffects

• Autor(a) principal: Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: Rossa, Walter
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10316/101405
• topic: Portuguese decolonization; Development; Heritage; Africa; Descolonização portuguesa; Desenvolvimento; Património; África

Portugal was a late decolonizer (1975). The “winds of change” had a delayed impact on Portuguese colonial territories. The authoritarian nature of empire and resilient forms of imperial nationalism fostered imperial permanence, and the transformative energies of global decolonization were mostly refused. Since the 1950s, a modernizing momentum occurred, transforming urban and rural colonial landscapes and multiplying infrastructures, from railways to ports, dams, and numerous public facilities. This momentum coexisted with the beginning of the colonial wars, from 1961 onward. The colonial attempts of heritagization were severely constrained by these factors. The same happened in the post-independence period, characterized by civil wars and political and economic disarray in most territories of former Portuguese Africa. Heritage discourses and policies hardly had space to emerge. Only in the 1990s were they embraced by governments, in a reticent manner and more in theory than in practice. This text addresses these issues, touching upon some examples and arguing that the study of the historical intersections between trajectories of decolonization, heritage discourses and repertoires, and international and local dynamics is crucial to a much-needed critical history of heritagization.