Lusotropicalism: Tropical geography under dictatorship, 1926–1974

Abstract

This article locates Portuguese tropical geography within wider academic debates on ‘tropicality’, contributing to discussion on not only the ‘tropicality of geography’ but also the ‘geography of tropicality’. It traces the role of Portuguese tropical geography in the colonial project and in the production of geographical knowledge, discourses and imaginaries, in particular the emergence of lusotropicality. While noting the underestimated connections with developments in German and British geography, we argue that the genealogy of Portuguese tropical geography lies mostly within contemporaneous French developments. By focusing on the central role of the Lisbon school (i.e. the Centre for Geographical Studies established in 1943), and in particular the tropical research initiated by Orlando Ribeiro (1911–1997), the paper seeks to engage with the ways in which geographical knowledge was produced within the academic discipline in Portugal under military dictatorship associated with the Estado Novo (1926–1974). By decentring the exploration of some of the ways in which the ‘tropics’ have been constructed and revising forms of producing geographical knowledge, the paper hopes to further understandings of the geographical imaginary of the tropics, unravelling the history and the role of geography in colonialism.

Visual tourism and post-colonialism: imaginative geographies of Africa in a Portuguese travel magazine

“…This theory was welcomed by Portuguese social scientists and was politically used in the dictatorship of Salazar as a 'scientific' justification for the permanence of Portugal in the tropics (Pimenta et al 2011). Lusotropicalism sustained the idea that the colonies were not possessions but, rather, an integral part of a multi-continental and multi-racial Portuguese nation, thus becoming particularly useful when the international pressure on Portugal in favour of decolonization began to emerge.…”

“…On the other hand, many of these photos display the image of an oldfashioned and out-dated modernity, as if cut short by decolonization. Urban photos expressed a nostalgia for empire, enveloped in a pleasant aesthetics of abandonment: semi-ruined Portuguese churches, decadent colonial mansions surrounded by abandoned gardens, ironmongers such as those found in Portugal 50 years ago, and old advertisements for the Sandeman Port wine, a cliché of the 1950s and 1960s Portuguese visual culture, converted in this context onto an icon of the lusotropicalism adapted to a post-colonial rhetoric (on lusotropicalism, see Pimenta, Sarmento, & Azevedo, 2011). Part of the Blue Travel African imagery recovers and resumes the theme of lusotropicalism and, accordingly, reflects and reproduces much of the old Portuguese colonialist myths.…”

The “refugee crisis” in Europe – between totality and the infinite

“…We still find a situation of colonial domination, already in a post-colonial regime, wherein the tropics constitute a way for anthropologists and geographers to talk about us and them, wherein totality erases the infinite, and does not exactly allow itself to be questioned and fertilised by it (Pimenta, Sarmento & Azevedo, 2011).…”

(Luso)tropicality and the materiality of decolonization

“…As Bowd and Clayton note, Gourou wasn't the only figure to use the term tropicality-the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre could also claim early uses of the term (along with 'tropicalism' and 'tropicology') (Hecht, 2013) and beyond the French geographical tradition, there were other significant national 'schools' of tropical geography. In Portugal, tropical geography was led by Orlando Ribeiro (whom Gourou had befriended) and centred on Lisbon's Centre for Geographical Studies established in 1943 (Pimenta et al, 2011). In part, it was stimulated by a series of state-sponsored scientific research missions to the tropics initiated by the Junta de Investigações do Ultramar (Board for Overseas Research).…”