An archaeology of decolonization: Imperial intimacies in contemporary Lisbon

Abstract

The fall of the European empires over the course of the 20th century forced massive migratory flows from the former colonies to the old metropolis and between colonized regions. The experiences that came with the loss of colonies were traumatic for the erstwhile colonials, who carried their imperial nostalgia to the old metropolises. The social and political consequences of these longings are still unfolding in former colonizing societies. This article critically engages the materialization of lusotropical sensibilities, focusing on contemporary Portuguese decolonization as it is experienced in Lisbon’s urban landscape. I argue that cafés, restaurants, and pastry shops frequented by retornados are not only places of memory but spaces where imperial longings are ingested and internalized.

Keywords

Late empires decolonization lusotropicalism forced migrations affect

Introduction

When I walk in Lisbon, I cannot help but wonder why there are so many eating and drinking places in the city still bearing imperial-inspired names, and why their presence in the capital’s urban landscape remains unchallenged decades after the independence of the former colonies. Portuguese imperialism officially ended in 1975, after a revolutionary coup led by the colonial army. Under the surface of a peaceful and multicultural urban life, there is still resentment for the end of empire, and an unspoken narrative of collective dispossession. Though concealed, these sensibilities frequently emerge over cups of coffee and on dinner tables, through the sharing of food and wine, as if the memory of empire could only be spoken of as a side dish.

This paper is the result of an encounter with an empire that still flows under the surface of a society that presents itself as European, democratic, and postcolonial. The under-surface metaphor is not random. Empires were built on many layers of power, which enclosed one another in arrangements that are not easily perceived at first glance. In a novel that reflects her own experience as a former white settler or retornada from Angola, Dulce Maria Cardoso (2016: 77–78) described decolonization as a process of unveiling surfaces and retrieving the intimate domains of empire:

It was strange to be stepping onto the Motherland; it was if we were entering the map that hung from the classroom wall. The map was torn in places revealing a darkened or dirty fabric behind it, a rough fabric that kept the map stiff and in one piece. We didn’t know what to do and it was as if we were entering the torn map, or perhaps the photographs in magazines, or the stories Mother was always telling us, the anthems we sang in the school yard on Saturday mornings.

The intimate rule of empire often mobilized racialized and sexualized bodies to establish hierarchies, and to enforce social arrangements between white settlers and indigenous communities (Stoler, 2002). These arrangements continued in postcolonial contexts, where racial and nationalist categories overlapped to reproduce white power in Europe (Almeida, 2004, 2008; Boehmer and Gouda, 2012), to the effect that the “post” in the postcolony is misguiding (Stoler, 2016). When it came to an end, the empire was dislocated and transported piece by piece to the former metropolis. With their bodies and the objects in their possession, former settlers carried the empire over, shaping and engaging with newly decolonizing landscapes.

Decolonization, like colonialism, is a multisensorial experience that generates its own materialities. Both colonialism and decolonization are ways of governing subjects, involving different layers of economic, social, and cultural relationships. Bodies and objects do not evoke empire simply because they were generated by empire. Rather, they convey notions and feelings of empire. Each of those bodies and objects indexes imperial experiences, either through people’s bodily engagement with the world or through the material qualities of objects (Armstrong, 1981: 3–20; Coelho, 2015; Gell, 1998). In the last decade, historical archaeologists have identified the instances in which colonialism was as much a sensorial experience as it was a deliberate plan contingent on capitalism and slavery, negotiated or imposed by imperial agents (e.g. Croucher and Weiss, 2011; Funari and Senatore, 2015).

Bodies and objects—or spaces—should not be considered as isolated entities that influence one another based on individual circumstances. They are all part of a continuous, sensorial flow that is historically constituted. The body and the senses, just like empires and objects, emerged through particular contexts. It means that we, as individuals, grow up learning how to be in the world and making sense of it in a certain context. Such context includes experience, memories, emotions, and all other aspects that are part of a process of becoming (Hamilakis, 2014: 111–128).

Thus, the empire does not necessarily end with the recognition of formal independence or with the removal of white settlers from the colonies. It continues through them and through all those for whom empire, in the former metropolis or elsewhere, continues to be meaningful. Once in the metropolis, the empire can be governed through a dislocated material world. This experience relies on interpretive codes and sensorial aspects of the everyday as much as it does on old public monuments (Peralta, 2017b: 9–10). The Portuguese empire continues through institutions, objects, buildings, relationships, memories, and habits that accompanied individuals and groups during decolonization (Domingos, 2017: 143).

But how does empire return and settle in the old metropolis? In order to answer this question, I will first provide a short history of the Portuguese late empire and an account of lusotropicalism, the ideological enterprise used by the dictatorship in order to legitimize empire in its last decades. Lusotropicalism's corpus of ideas did not just animate empire, but encouraged its survival even after the loss of the colonies. I will then discuss how the decolonization process can be understood as an imperial flow enabled by a specific materiality. This materiality comprises all the stuff involved in the departure, travel, and resettling of erstwhile colonials back in Europe. This context framed the emergence of an entirely new group of people: the returners, retornados, who went back even if they had never set a foot out of the colony (Kalter, 2017; Peralta, 2017a). The multisensorial assemblage of things, retornados’ bodies, memories, and the physical contours of the metropolis were articulated as an intimate regime of empire.

In this paper, I argue that decolonization in Portugal was the reconfiguration and extension of the empire, not its disintegration. Through decolonization, in fact, the empire ceased to be imbedded in colonial territories in Africa and elsewhere, and instead “returned” to Europe, where it became an intimate regime flowing through flesh, ideas, and things. I propose an archaeological approach to the unfolding drama of decolonization in Lisbon, through its surfaces, its eateries, bodies, and digestive tracts, to explain how the empire is still affectively conveyed in the present.

This intimate regime of empire is materialized in contemporary Lisbon businesses, such as coffee houses, restaurants, and pastry shops that keep imperial names, decorations, and memories. These are physical and social spaces where empire is internalized and performed. Their spatial organization does not just represent peoples’ ideas and lives. It affects them and elicits embodied responses that are nondiscursive or rational but are nevertheless a form of intelligence about the world. In fact, the way space and digestion elicit responses is beyond subjectivity; affect is a force that flows through materials and bodies, generating relationships (Navaro-Yashin, 2009: 10–15; Thrift, 2004: 60).

Retornados’ bodies and nostalgic eateries of Lisbon are part of what Ann Laura Stoler called the “imperial debris.” The debris is not just what is left after the implosion of empire. It consists of “disparate moments, places, and objects” that affect people’s everyday lives in the context of resilient, more or less visible imperial relations (Stoler, 2013). If decolonization is a rhizomatic process with multiple origins, connections, and outcomes (apud Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), then Portugal’s old metropolis was reconfigured under the pressure of imperial debris during the course of decolonization, transforming into empire itself.

In this sense, Lisbon’s eating and drinking establishments are not only places of memory. They are spaces where an imperial ideology may become intimate through the shape of a physical environment. Places like restaurants and coffee houses with colonial-inspired names and decorations are not just traces of a bygone era. They are pressure points that enable relationships, “exchange of sensory memories and emotions” (Seremetakis, 1993: 14), through eating and drinking. The linearity of time and the articulation of past and present collapse in these places; old colonial stories told by owners and customers intersect current social issues, as they all engage in eating, drinking, and conversation. To eat, drink, and talk unsettles contemporary narratives of decolonization and reveals new historical surfaces in which the resentment of retornados is blended with present anxieties about social change (Stoler, 2016: 26–36).

These topographies depict the portrait of an old metropolis that was never fully decolonized. Critical analyses of empire reveal it as a space of negotiation, deconstructing the idea that it is a single, well-designed project (Stoler, 2002, 2006). I will move further and discuss how empire, with the decolonization process, moved and settled back in the old metropolis as an intimate domain. Svetlana Boym (2001: 77) pointed out that “places are contexts for remembrances and debates about the future, not symbols of memory or nostalgia. Thus, places in the city are not merely architectural metaphors; they are also screen memories for urban dwellers, projections of contested remembrances.” After Boym, I maintain that a topos “refers both to a place in discourse and a place in the world” (Boym, 2001: 77). The physical contours of the eateries give immediacy to lusotropicalism, its colonial memories and public sentiments. They materialize an intimate regime of empire that is multisensorial (Stoler, 2016: 33–36).

The shape of a city like Lisbon, with its monuments and colonial toponymies, sets the spatial frame for the reconfiguration of the empire as an intimate domain, by providing a social and physical dimension in which the empire could flourish after the independence of colonies. My goal in this article is to uncover some of the surfaces of this imperial patchwork, like Dulce Maria Cardoso, to understand how empire still flows in contemporary Lisbon.

The Portuguese late empire

The Berlin Conference (1884--1885) was the event that triggered the colonization of the vast inner territories of Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau (Alexandre, 1998). The Portuguese government sent several exploratory expeditions to Africa and tried to secure agreements with regional rulers that effectively put them under colonial rule. This process was far from easy. Historian René Pélissier (1977, 1978) documented numerous revolts and large-scale conflicts that opposed African communities to the Portuguese colonial efforts in Angola. Those colonial wars were intertwined with global conflicts in different occasions; like during the First World War, when German colonial troops took advantage of weak colonial control of Portuguese territories and fought for Angola and Mozambique. The African independence wars of the 1960s–1970s were the last in a series of colonial wars that had started in the late 19th century and ended only with the demise of empire.

Following the military conquest of the interior, settlers started to arrive in Africa from Europe and other colonial territories in large numbers, but they were largely confined to coastal towns. This situation changed with the implementation of a large-scale colonization plan after the 1910 Republican revolution, when colonial authorities designed a comprehensive infrastructural program that could integrate different regions, submit native peoples, and facilitate the economic development of the colonies (Wheeler and Pélissier, 1971: 109–128). It was always difficult, however, to settle Europeans and make the colonies economically significant (Jerónimo, 2015; Jerónimo and Monteiro, 2013; Pereira, 2013).

This context started to change after the Second World War, when anticolonial movements started to sprout all over the world and the European powers began to relinquish imperial sovereignty (Reis, 2014). Dictator António de Oliveira Salazar was determined to resist. The empire was officially abolished in 1951, when the colonies were renamed “overseas provinces.” This name change was part of a broader process to make empire look more agreeable in an international arena that was increasingly anticolonialist. For the first time, large groups of white settlers started to arrive in Africa to participate in large-scale efforts to modernize and develop the colonies (Castelo, 2017; Pélissier, 1978: 32–51).

In this new context, Portuguese authorities gradually moved away from the narrative that had dominated imperialism since the 1880s, which was grounded on racism and a notion of European superiority. By the late 1950s, they had already generated a corpus of ideas justified by a new notion of Portuguese exceptionalism, designated lusotropicalism. This corpus was inspired by the work of Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, who suggested that the Portuguese, due to their mixed European and Mediterranean heritage, were historically fated to intermarriage. The idea that Portuguese imperialism was universalistic, prone to peaceful encounters and creation of multicultural societies, was at the core of the lusotropicalist mythology (Castelo, 1999; Thomaz, 2002 cf. Andrade 1954: 5-6).

By the 1950s, it was too late for Portugal to prevent the emergence of decolonization movements (Oliveira, 2017). The empire’s annus horribilis was 1961. In February, anticolonial demonstrations erupted in the north of Angola, starting a 13-year-long liberation war. In July, the newly independent republic of Benin occupied the fortress of Ouidah, and guerrilla warfare started in Guinea-Bissau. The territories of Goa, Daman, and Diu on the coast of the Arabian Sea were occupied by India later in December. Most of the empire was engulfed with conflict by 1964, when the liberation war started in Mozambique. From then until the Carnation Revolution in 1974, the Portuguese government committed most of the nation’s human and economic resources to maintain the empire. This effort included the conscription of young males to the armed forces, as well as significant investments in the economic development of the colonies. In the meantime, structural poverty and antiwar resistance pushed thousands of migrants across the borders to western Europe. The end of the dictatorial regime was eventually triggered by the government during these years. In April 1974, the colonial army performed a coup aiming to end the dictatorship and the war, recognize the colonies’ right to self-determination, and open the way to a socialist revolution.

The image of the Portuguese empire as an exceptionally beneficent project continued to thrive even after the 1974 revolution. No longer directly associated with the dictatorship, lusotropicalism was internalized and became a marker of Portuguese identity. Specific historical circumstances aside, the mythologization of Portuguese colonialism is not very different from other European nation-states that held significant colonial empires. In the Netherlands, for example, the Dutch East Indies tends to be represented as a “paradise lost” in postcolonial memory (De Mul, 2010; Pattynama, 2012). The memory of colonial violence is systematically occluded by an image of Dutch colonialism as a well-tempered enterprise based on trade and the management of native tensions. The “virtues of colonial synthesis” became a contemporary source of Dutch pride and national identity (Boehmer and Gouda, 2012: 26–28).

In Italy, similarly, the colonial experience has been dominated by the myth of italiani brava gente. The image of Italians as “good people” is also a source of mainstream national pride, even if it does not offer an explanation of Italy’s brief colonialism in regions such as Libya and Eritrea, and its ambiguous decolonization from the Second World War until the 1970s. The “good people” are defined vis-à-vis other imperial states, deemed uncompassionate by comparison. In contemporary Italy, the myth of brava gente and historical revisionism go hand in hand, explaining how the imperial project was intertwined with fascism (Del Boca, 2005: 291–306; Labanca, 2002: 427–470, 2010; Taddia, 2005).

The accession of Portugal to the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1986—today’s European Union—and the postcolonial immigration of citizens from former colonies generated an identity crisis among the Portuguese elites, who continue to aspire to the narrative of Portuguese historical exceptionalism (Lourenço, 2011). Lusotropicalism became the default way of Portuguese self-representation (Almeida, 2004: 77–82, 2008). This ideology thrived because it was materialized in a spatiality that mobilized peoples’ bodies in an intimate flow that included empire and its memory.

The materiality of decolonization

Empires were tangible enterprises. In order to rule, imperial authorities drew maps; designed administrative buildings and fortresses; distributed colonial staples like spices, sugar, and coffee; promoted ethnic cleansing and miscegenation. Colonialism had to work on bodies because the effectiveness of an imposed administration was contingent on various degrees of racial segregation. Mixed race bodies, for example, marked the visibility of power in the Portuguese colonies and later became targets of violence during liberation wars. On the other hand, black bodies endured the violence of forced labor and imperial disciplinary practices. Throughout history, the control and discipline of bodies were the crux of imperial authority (Given, 2004: 93–115; Monteiro, 2018); bodies are still sites of conflict in the postcolony (Shepherd, 2013).

These material processes were part of a flow that linked different experiences of oppression, resistance, and survival. Imperial governance left a trail that can be recognized on landscapes and bodies. The same goes for decolonization. Late imperialism and decolonization can be recognized among other disruptive events such as wars and massive migrations that characterize what Alfredo González-Ruibal (2008) called “supermodernity.” Expansive industrialization, as well as accelerated flows of people and communications, triggered social and environmental catastrophes that are still leaving their footprints on the world. The Portuguese decolonization process in the mid-1970s was a consequence of African liberation struggles and competition between superpowers for world supremacy.

One of the main outcomes of the Carnation Revolution in April 1974 was the end of the colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. By December 1975, all former African colonies had achieved independence. The Portuguese state scheduled ceremonies with the liberation movements and arranged for the gradual departure of troops. However, the new Portuguese authorities did not expect the sudden exodus of settlers and personnel from those territories. Many whites also wished to stay in Africa, either because they did not see themselves as complicit with the colonial rule or because they were sympathetic towards the independence movements.

Political events unfolded in unexpected ways, especially for colonials in Angola and Mozambique. Unlike in Guinea-Bissau, there was more than one liberation movement fighting against the Portuguese military. As independence approached, these organizations started to fight among each other for supremacy. The revolutionaries in Lisbon recognized Marxist groups as their new interlocutors, which were supported by the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. Their opponents were backed by the United States, and by apartheid states such as Rhodesia—today’s Zimbabwe—and South Africa. The fear of revenge and the growing climate of civil war pushed many whites to Luanda and Lourenço Marques with the prospect of leaving for Lisbon, Brazil, and elsewhere. The displaced white settlers were joined by many Goese, Cape Verdeans, and others who had been moving around the empire as administrative staff, and who also feared reprisals by the newly liberated peoples (Góis, 2017).

The migration that accompanied these events caught the authorities by surprise. There were no plans to evacuate the colonials who started arriving in large numbers to airports and harbors. Banks ran out of reserves, as masses flocked to exchange local currencies to the metropolitan escudo. The exodus of the colonials left a material trail: in the abandoned farms and towns in the African heartlands, or in forgotten drawers in the metropolis, where retornados stored unchangeable colonial currencies. Perhaps the most spectacular aspect of this trail was the process of packing belongings and assembling crates to store and transport them. In just a few weeks, or sometimes even just a couple of days, people had to make practical decisions about what to take or leave behind, how to move or discard their households. One of the most pressuring tasks of decolonizing was moving stuff.

The urban landscape of places like Luanda was radically transformed in the process. Many of the residents started packing their belongings in wooden crates. When hardware stores ran out of wood, people started building crates from all sorts of materials, like scrap metal and large road signs. By late 1975, Luanda was crowded with migrants and its streets were full of crates of all styles and sizes. Witnesses were impressed by the overwhelming, repetitive sound of nail hammering that dominated the city, as well as the smell of uncollected trash and things rotting on the streets (Adamopoulos, 2012: 155; Kapuściński, 1987: 25–27). Ryszard Kapuściński (1987: 16–17), a correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, described how the Luanda of stone-masonry was replaced by crates:

The building of the wooden city, the city of crates, goes on day after day, from dawn to twilight. Everyone works, soaked with rain, burned by the sun; even the millionaires, if they are physically fit, turn to the task. The enthusiasm of the adults infects the children. They too build crates, for their dolls and toys. Packing takes place under cover of night. (…) So, by night, in the thickest darkness, we transfer the contents of the stone city to the inside of the wooden city.

Colonials’ migration out of Africa occurred in different ways. Many people in the capitals and major transportation hubs managed to get into airplanes and ships that had been arranged by the Portuguese and international governments for the evacuation. Others fled the colonies in small, improvised groups (Figure 1). Some drove in caravans to South Africa or got away in small fishing boats. Jorge Rodrigues was in a convoy that departed Angola in August 1975, composed of over 500 cars. After reaching the South West African border—now Namibia—the convoy was sent by South African soldiers to a refugee camp in Oshakati, where they also convinced the Portuguese to sell most of their belongings: fridges, stoves, cars, motorcycles, tableware, everything they could. From Oshakati they moved inland toward another camp in Grootfontein. At that point, some decided to move to Walvis Bay and get in a ship to Portugal. Others went by train to Johannesburg, and then by plane to Brazil (Adamopoulos, 2012: 56).

Figure 1.

Car abandoned near the Cunene river, Namib desert, Angola. Source: Photo by Alexandre Correia (2008).

The paths of white colonials were as diverse as their origins and political sensibilities. Their tracks, however, are still recognizable on the desert landscape of Namibia. Archaeologist John Kinahan identified a bivouac among hummock dunes several kilometers south of the Kunene river mouth, which included soft-drink bottles, rusted cans, a hearth, and driftwood planks gathered from the beach (John Kinahan, 2013, personal communication).

Many of the things carried or shipped by the Portuguese never arrived at their destination. Luísa Neves, a woman who returned from Angola in 1975, wrote to a newspaper complaining about the robbery of one of her crates and the disappearance of another. She listed the stolen objects: a radio, a china coffee set, a crystal tea set, sewing materials, and a stove, among other things (Armada, 1975). Another woman decided to wait for her baggage at the airport, refusing to leave for at least eight days (Peralta et al., 2017: 117). The objects kept by retornados throughout the decolonization process are now kept at home, in intimate archives that are usually collections of small things, souvenirs, and photographs.

Figure 2.

Retornados’ crates in Lisbon, 1975. Source: Photo by Gouveia, SNI-Arquivo Fotográfico, ceded by ANTT (Peralta et al., 2017: 252–253).

Images must be understood here as material culture, as they are handled and caressed, and placed in other objects such as wallets and frames (Edwards, 2010: 23). Photographs were easier to transport, circumventing baggage limitations. The indexicality of photographs makes their affective power last longer, perhaps more powerfully than any other object that might have survived the return. Many of those photographs are now being shared in public exhibitions, online, and in the social media, where they are circulated among retornados and descendants. Images’ embodied responses create bonds and enable the reconfiguration of imperial memories in the old metropolis (Edwards, 2010; Vicente, 2017).

The removal of white settlers and administrative officers from the African territories to mainland Portugal was short and traumatic. In less than two years between 1974 and 1975, five to eight hundred thousand people moved out of their homes and jobs, leaving behind part of their lives. The Portuguese already living in Europe were facing an economic crisis and did not welcome the newcomers (Kalter, 2017; Peralta, 2017a).

Lisbon as imperial capital

In 1974–1975, as the independence movements roared through the colonial capitals of Africa, retornados landed in Lisbon with the empire in their crates, suitcases, and pockets. Their empire was also a diffuse corpus of ideas that turned their bodies, and the bodies of the colonized, into ultimate vehicles of imperial power. They had accepted decades of colonial wars, the miscegenation myths of lusotropicalism, and were utterly unprepared for a rushed displacement, for “return” (cf. Valadão, 2012: 181).

In the early 1970s, Lisbon was a mythscape, an agglomerate of several centuries of colonial topographies (Bell, 2003). Those topographies consisted of streets, architectures, and monuments that were either purposely crafted to engage in the colonial venture or to celebrate it. The liberal regimes of the late 19th century and early 20th century turned the capital’s urban space into a showcase of their late imperial projects, which included expeditions to central Africa and its military conquest.

However, it was only with the consolidation of the dictatorship in the 1930s and 1940s that imperialism was fully integrated into the formation of a national identity. It was around that time that empire became fully intertwined with the urban fabric (Peralta, 2017b: 89–90). City planners started the construction of a new neighborhood in the parish of Arroios, north of the traditional city center, by 1930. The new area was designed to accommodate a middle class of public servants, in a new form of state-sponsored architecture that was simultaneously modest and modern. Architectural historian Patrícia Santos Pedrosa (2011) called it “anonymous architecture,” a model whose goal was to disseminate modern aesthetics but with the limited intervention of professional architects. In 1933, the municipality named the streets of this area after the colonies, which is why it is still called bairro das colónias, “neighborhood of the colonies” (Edital municipal, 19 June 1933).

The timing was not a coincidence. Early in April, Salazar’s government issued a new, fascist-inspired constitution along with a new set of regulations for colonial governance. The first Imperial Conference took place in Lisbon in May, an opportunity to convene the governors of colonial territories and celebrate Salazar’s imperial project (Decreto no. 22.322, 16 March 1933). The only significant change in the toponymy of this area to date was the renaming of the main square from “Colonies Plaza” to “Overseas Plaza” and then to “New Nations Plaza” after the African independences. Many of the businesses discussed in this article are located in this part of the city.

Materialization of the imperial imagination in the capital was more visible in the redevelopment of Belém (Peralta, 2017b: 65–115). This riverine area was used as a harbor since antiquity and played a major role in the representation of imperial power since the early 16th century. Vasco da Gama allegedly departed from here in his first trip to India, and the dynasty of Avis built their mausoleum nearby along with a Hieronymite monastery. Belém became a target for urban renewal with the dictatorship in the 1930s (Nobre, 2010), and in 1940 hosted the Portuguese World Exhibition. The fair was organized to celebrate the foundation of the monarchy in 1140 and the restoration of independence from Spain in 1640, two hallmarks in the celebratory agenda of the dictatorship. With this ambitious project at the height of the Second World War, Salazar intended to present Portugal as a peaceful country whose civilizing mission was consistent throughout centuries. The “monument to the discoveries” was designed for the exhibition and remains one of the most significant landmarks in the city. It was originally built as an ephemeral building but was permanently rebuilt in 1960 to celebrate the centenary of Henry the Navigator (Peralta, 2017b: 92).

Both Belém and the “neighborhood of the colonies” became central spaces in the reconfiguration of Lisbon as capital by engineering imperial affect (Thrift, 2004: 64–68). The neighborhood of the colonies was built and named to intervene in the capital’s social imagination as a low-profile, modern project that naturalized imperialism in the everyday. Belém, meanwhile, became the main space of imperial representation in Portugal. After the 1974 Revolution, freight ships unloaded retornados’ belongings along the shorelines of Lisbon, all the way down to Belém (Figure 2). Images from the time show crates made in Angola, Mozambique, and elsewhere under the shade of Henry the Navigator. When the empire collapsed, Lisbon’s colonial topographies remained untouched, initially providing a safe space for the imperial flows brought by the retornados. Eventually, decolonization became a symbol of democratization; public displays of the empire were gradually silenced. They became intimate, cornered into spaces of eating and drinking, which is where they remain today.

Eating and drinking empire

Lisbon’s urban landscape gradually became a stage to represent and perform late imperial power. These representations affected the world’s perceptions of Portugal as a colonial power, but more importantly, they were used to shape national identity and legitimize Salazar’s dictatorship in the country. However grand or ubiquitous, the empire was not complete without a material extension into its subjects’ intimate domains, their bodies, and senses. Space shapes people through their daily interactions. The material aspects of places such as restaurants and cafés affect their patrons; they enable social life through to their location, decoration, spatial arrangements. Moreover, they affect customers’ bodies, by making their ideological character flow in the digestive system. The names of the businesses, the decorations on their walls, the coffee served, and the stories told by the waiters: these are all part of the flows of things that make Lisbon residents internalize empire.

Visiting these spaces is a form of drama; it is like walking on a stage where ideas and memories of the empire are performed. Space also sets the limits of the everyday, by marking the routine of those who stop for a morning coffee or a midday snack. Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) argues that a few things make places visible: “rivalry or conflict with other places, visual prominence, the evocative power of art, architecture, ceremonials and rites,” and dramatization: “Human places become vividly real through dramatization. Identity of place is achieved by dramatizing the aspirations, needs, and functional rhythms of personal and group life” (178).

In the Portuguese capital, the empire is displayed on the material surface of business names and decorations and is personally charged by memory. Lisbon’s establishments have a synesthetic effect by intersecting the experience of sensory dimensions such as taste, olfaction, and vision (Sutton, 2001: 73–102). This way, eating, drinking, and socializing are performative events that articulate an intimate regime of empire.

Lisbon is dotted with a constellation of food shops, cafés, restaurants, and other eating places, privately owned, that engage intimately with an imperial narrative. Since the summer of 2012, I have been inventorying them. Very few places have an online presence. My methodology is therefore based on reviewing Páginas Amarelas (equivalent to the US Yellow Pages) and surveying certain areas in the city. In the end, I counted 30 places: nine restaurants, eight coffee houses, four pastry shops, three delicatessens that work as pastry shops as well, two alehouses and two delicatessens. There is also a coffee roaster and a specialty coffee and tea shop. I visited all throughout the years and became a regular customer in a few. I interviewed managers, owners, or workers of nine of those establishments. My personal immersion in these places was crucial, as it was the only way to reflect on sensorial features that would otherwise feel fragmentary and banal (Seremetakis, 1993).

The Portuguese state has encouraged tourism in areas that have significant monuments and historical edifices (Peralta, 2017b); the establishments studied in this paper, however, appear in neighborhoods that lack monumentality and mainstream cultural interest. Only two are in the historic center, near Praça do Comércio and the old wharfs. Most places I found and visited were scattered across Lisbon’s middle-class residential areas, catering to residents rather than tourists. Six are located in the neighborhood of the colonies, where one may also find a pharmacy named Farmácia Colonial, or a mechanic named Auto Colonial. Most of the inventoried businesses here first opened during the dictatorship.

Names are the most visible features of the imperial character of these businesses. Most are straightforward, like Império (empire), Colónias (colonies), or Ultramarina (overseas). Some have specific colonial topoi, named after China, India, Guinea, Luanda, Huíla, Chaimite, or Goa, which are all regions or sites that were previously settled, administered by, or connected to the Portuguese empire.

Some of them display decorative schemes that are visually linked to the imperial imagination. Casa da Índia (the House of India), a restaurant established in the 1960s, borrows its name from the institution that managed the early empire’s economy (Figure 3). Its manager Mr Araújo claims that Casa’s warehouses were used to store Indian spices in the 16th century. Its façade bears the last coat of arms of colonial India (1935–1961). The space inside is permanently engulfed in the smoke of barbecue chicken and the chit-chat of its clientele. There is a panel depicting a fleet sailing to distant lands, a Renaissance-like explorer, and two symbols of Portuguese imperialism, an armillary sphere and a padrão, a territory marker. The armillary sphere is particularly noteworthy because the Portuguese coat of arms still bears it; first used by King Manuel I (1469–1521), it indexes Portuguese ambitions of universal empire. Several frames hanging on Casa da Índia’s walls display postcards sent by customers during visits to their home countries or holiday travels to other places. The journeys of the cards, along with the food produced and consumed in the restaurant, become extensions of the empire into the corporal domain of eating. As he turns the meat on the grill, Mr Araújo tells me his patrons are very proud of Portugal’s history.

Figure 3.

Restaurant Casa da Índia, Lisbon, 2012. Source: Photo by the author.

A pastelaria, pastry shop, named Continental also displays a tile panel similar to the one in Casa da Índia: At its center is a fleet sailing in the Atlantic, surrounded by portraits of Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) and two other explorers, depictions of navigation instruments, the Avis dynasty coat of arms, a glass of beer, and a cup of espresso. The panel is framed by foliage in revivalist baroque style (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Continental pastry shop, Lisbon, 2012. Source: Photo by the author.

Sabores de Goa (Flavors of Goa) is a restaurant in the neighborhood of the colonies managed by the Rebelos, a family of Indian background who all embody the late empire. The parents were born in Goa and later moved to work for the colonial administration in Mozambique, where their first son was born. After Mozambican independence, they all moved back briefly to Goa and later on to Lisbon. I went to Sabores de Goa on a busy weekday. Mr Rebelo invited me to sit at his table, where he was having lunch with a friend. I ordered vindalho, a celebrated Goan dish of marinated pork that evokes Southern European palates. Surrounded with pictures of monuments, landscapes, and an old map of colonial Goa on the wall, the two friends were talking about Mozambique in the 1970s. They blamed the military for its loss; military and left-wing politicians colluded, they said, to end the empire and steal its wealth, neglecting the families who were forced to move to Portugal. Mr Rebelo’s son came to serve the table and commented that they travel to India every year; “Goa is where we eat really well.”

In comparison, representations of the empire remain more oblique in other places: Inside a pastelaria named Flor do Império (The Empire’s Flower), a tile panel depicts one of the proposed plans to reconstruct the plaza of the royal palace after its destruction in the 1755 great earthquake, decorated with images of ships, the Crown coat of arms, and baroque revivalist iconography. The logo of one coffee house bearing the name Luanda, the capital of Angola, depicts a black woman carrying a basket of coffee and a baby on her back. Inside, walls are partially covered with tile panels depicting large African mammals and wildlife, painted in a revivalist rococo style, which is usually associated with the late 18th century rule of the Marquis of Pombal (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Luanda coffee house, Lisbon, 2012. Source: Photo by the author.

Sometimes, the connection with the empire is not visible at all. The company that owns Café Capri, formerly Café Colonial, is still called Café Pastelaria Colonial, Lda. The name is not displayed anywhere but behind the door, printed on the license that is legally required to remain visible. The current manager said that the name of the café changed when one of the business partners acquired its share, but the company kept the original name, “as a way of remembering Portuguese history and its empire.”

In some cases, the connection with the empire is established entirely through the owners’ and managers’ memories. A small restaurant in Arroios is named Calunga, a polysemic Bantu word which, in Brazil or Africa, is usually associated with an ancestral deity, “a supreme being of creation and death” (Byrd and Moraes, 2007: 27). Its owner, Mr Malheiro, was born in Angola and moved to Portugal in 1975. For him, Calunga is a link to the homeland; there was a coffee house in Angola with the name, owned by a different family. For customers and outsiders, it is a random name displayed in a small neon sign. For the Malheiros, it is a way of bearing the memories of Africa. “Only a few patrons make the connection between the word and Angola,” Mr Malheiro concedes.

Café Império opened in 1955 as part of a large movie theater complex that is now formally registered as heritage. Mr Gonçalves has been working there since 1972, since he was 18 years old. He says that the clientele is aging fast and nostalgically recalls the days when the Café was a lively venue: Students came to discuss politics, both right- and left-wing. Some regulars were from the African colonies. They would come to have coffee, and stay all day, to study. The Casa dos Estudantes do Império, a state-sponsored student organization and the cradle of African nationalism until its closure in 1965, used to be nearby. My cup of coffee in Café Império thus came with a well-rounded note of lusotropicalism; in Mr Gonçalves’s narrative, black African students were culturally mingling with the metropolitans, even while conspiring against imperial rule.

Leitaria Ultramarina is a coffee house located on a corner of the former praça do ultramar (plaza of the overseas) in the neighborhood of the colonies. Mr Fragueiro returned from Angola in 1975 and purchased the business in the 1980s. Like Café Colonial, the name can only be found in the Yellow Pages and on the license hanging behind the door. Like Mr Malheiro at Calunga, the imperial connection flows through the memories of Mr Fragueiro, who is eager to tell customers like me about his life in Africa, where he was a veterinary nurse. Realizing my limited knowledge of Angola’s geography, he describes directions and distances as if I was standing at a roadside gas station. He talks about the abundance of his youth; “three to four hundred thousand liters of milk per day were used [in] the dairy factory where [he] used to work,” and complains about the corruption of politicians today. They wronged the retornados, he thought, and they changed prerevolutionary toponymies. In Leitaria Ultramarina, small groups of retornados mingle with other residents, in a place where the conversation flows through colonial memories, contemporary politics, eating and drinking.

Coffee is Africa

A small number of businesses that manufacture, roast, and sell coffee also embody intimate connections of the empire. Coffee is no longer a colonial product in Portugal, but its affective presence is still linked to the imperial past. It was an important colonial staple and a source of national pride; in fact, colonial Angola was the fourth largest producer of coffee worldwide in 1956, and the first African provider to the United States (Silva, 2018: 179). Mr Rodrigues, who escaped from Angola to South Africa in the summer of 1975, recalled that some retornados tried to take coffee with them in their dangerous exodus through the deserts of Namibia (Adamopoulos, 2012: 56).

Pérola do Chaimite (Chaimite’s Pearl) is a shop that specializes in gourmet coffee and tea. It opened in 1939, named after Chaimite, a Mozambican village mostly known for being the place where the Portuguese army defeated Ngungunhane, the last ruler of Gaza, in 1895. Mr Leal, the manager, says that the customers appreciate the vintage décor and the ways in which the merchandise appeals to the senses. “Some of the older customers associate the name of the business to the memory of empire, especially because coffee is Africa.” Pérola do Chaimite is a popular spot in the upper-middle class parish Avenidas Novas. Old residents bring their grandchildren to shop for old-fashioned candy; young professionals and students are also becoming regular patrons, purchasing from the selection of bulk coffee beans from Cape Verde, Angola, or East Timor. When he opens shop each morning, Mr Leal takes out the sculpture of a black man holding a basket by the entrance, which evokes the subservient blackamoor statues of the early modern period. During the 2018 World Cup, the statue wore a scarf of the Portuguese national soccer team.

Roaster Cafés Negrita was established in 1924. It dealt with coffee plantations from all over the Portuguese empire, including Cape Verde, São Tomé, East Timor, and especially Angola. The current owner and the founder’s son, Mr Pinha, thinks that one of the consequences of independence in the colonies was the decrease in the quality of coffee, due to the exodus of agronomist experts and the instability caused by civil wars. In any case, Cafés Negrita still favors imports from the former colonies. In a recent interview, for example, Mr Pinha discusses the difference between arabica, which comprises the largest share in the world’s coffee market, and robusta, a coffee bean with a higher concentration of caffeine. Mr Pinha explains that the Portuguese prefer robusta coffee, which he believes is because “we stayed in Africa for so many years” (Lagartinho, 2017). Indeed, Angolan robusta was central to Portugal’s efforts to modernize its empire; the production of robusta aimed at showcasing the “robustness” of empire (Silva, 2018).

Cafés Negrita used to cater to Café Império, one of the oldest coffee houses in Lisbon which changed hands several years ago. The new administration hired a foreigner, a Brazilian, to run the business and found a different, cheaper roaster. According to Mr Pinha, patrons of Café Império in the upper-middle class Arroios disliked the new coffee, and pressured the manager to get their beans from Cafés Negrita again. “The flavor is closer to how coffee used to be in our times,” they said, before the independence of the colonies (Figure 6).

Figure 6.

Drinking Negrita coffee at Café Império, Lisbon, 2012. Source: Photo by the author.

Mr Pinha and I walked to his office while he told me this story. He showed me several samples of coffee beans harvested in former Portuguese colonies in the 1960s and 1970s, now carefully displayed on shelves. He handed them to me so I could compare with samples currently processed by the roaster. “Older customers still buy coffee out of nostalgia—saudosismo,” he said. He occasionally gets calls from people who are resistant to purchasing different types of coffee, or from younger customers who wonder about how coffee tasted like in the old days.

Saudosismo is also about the relationships enabled by the business, he thinks, which entangled producers, distributors, and roasters in a special “friendship.” This was broken by the severance of the ties to the colonies and by the pressure from large companies. The formal end of empire in 1974–1975 forced a “sensory displacement” (Seremetakis, 1994: 3) for those who were familiarized with a coffee that was not just coffee; it was coffee that tasted of empire. The synesthetic sediments of empire were not removed through the years; they continue to affect the present in many ways. I returned to Cafés Negrita in 2018, six years after my first interview with Mr Pinha. Mr Pinha’s daughter, who is now running the company, complained about the number of commercial customers who are now relinquishing the services of their family-owned roaster. As if empire was shaking once again.

From a certain perspective, the gourmet coffee from Pérola do Chaimite and the everyday roasts of Cafés Negrita are not unlike the coffee samples of the colonial times kept by Mr Pinha in his office. They articulate an intimate regime of empire and thereby affect the Lisbonite senses. Coffee is like a souvenir; it points to the limits of past experiences and are reminders of events that cannot be repeated. As Susan Stewart (1984) suggested, souvenirs replace “a context of perpetual consumption for its context of origin” (135). Coffee production, distribution, and consumption goes beyond the social function of the souvenir. It evokes not only the old colonies, but also the specific political condition of colonialism and decolonization in multisensorial terms. It tastes, smells, visualizes, and embodies social lives (Seremetakis, 1994: 14). As an object, coffee elicits the physical flow that connects empire to contemporary life.

Conclusion

This article argues that decolonization in Portugal is more complicated than the closure of a historical cycle and the opening of a new era deemed postcolonial (Stoler, 2016). In different locales and material circumstances, decolonization as a multisensorial process was articulated in bodies, objects, and space. It formed an intimate regime of empire. As a form of imperial governance, the material and sensorial flow of the empire through bodies, objects, and spaces connected different experiences of domination, resistance, and perseverance. The retornados who arrived in the old metropolis unpacked a material world they brought along in their forced displacement, affecting the intimate topographies in Lisbon such as cafés, restaurants, and pastry shops, whose names were inspired by colonial events, memories, and toponymies. Many of them continue to supply a lusotropicalist narrative in which the Portuguese were good colonizers and humanists in a world full of violence.

Lisbon’s urban landscape continues to be subjected to development projects and celebratory events that mobilize lusotropical memories (Peralta, 2017b), enabling a continuous flow of empire that connects contemporary consumption to the colonial past. The flow goes through the “distribution of sentiments” (Stoler, 2006: 4) and ends in the digestive tract of the old metropolis.

Politicians, city planners, and entrepreneurs continue to project urban futures through the nostalgia of imperial pasts (Bartu, 2001; Boym, 2001: 75–82). In 1998, the Expo world fair celebrated 500 years since Vasco da Gama’s arrival in India. In 2007, the government commissioned the tourism promotion named “Portugal: Europe’s West Coast.” Since then, there have been a number of museums, exhibitions, and cultural events celebrating Lisbon’s imperial character, now translated as global and cosmopolitan (Peralta, 2017b: 116–176).

The lives of nonwhite communities displaced from former Portuguese colonies remain parallel to this vibrant imperial Lisbon—even though, until Portugal’s accession to the EEC in 1986, nearly half of the foreigners living in the country were nationals of Portuguese-speaking African countries (Baganha et al., 2009). In the “postcolony,” they were transformed into “immigrants” or “minorities,” and relegated to the spatial margins of urban centers and the nation-state (Almeida, 2004, 2008). Although they are directly affected by contemporary politics of Portugal’s lusotropical identity, the experiences of African-descent people remain peripheral to the eateries discussed in this paper.

Unlike other imperial capitals such as Istanbul, St Petersburg, or Berlin, Lisbon was never really modern; nostalgia had to be crafted in order to promote the city’s local idiosyncrasies in the age of globalization. In other words, the affective responses that colonial-inspired spaces and products elicit are not nostalgia or melancholia (Boym, 2001; Navaro-Yashin, 2009); imperial Lisbon is not an “endangered landscape” to be protected (Boym, 2001: 80). Its restaurants, coffee houses, and pastry shops remained untouched before, during, and after the formal independence of the colonies; they are not, strictly speaking, “colonial legacy” (L’Estoile, 2008: 267–268). The empire returned and resettled in Lisbon, where it continued as an enterprise that never ceased to shape Lisbonites’ experiences. Lisbon is still waiting for the postcolony to arrive in this ongoing, permanent process of decolonization.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This paper was first presented in a session organized by Salvatore Garfi and Alfredo González-Ruibal at the 2013 meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology in Leicester. The text benefited from many conversations and comments since then. I am thankful to Hande Sarikuzu, Trinidad Rico, Inês Beleza Barreiros, Patrícia Martins Marcos, Pedro Schacht Pereira, Pamela Smart, Douglas Holmes, Josh Reno, John Kinahan, Rodney Harrison, Matheus Pereira, José Pedro Monteiro, and the anonymous reviewers. I am also grateful to Elsa Peralta and Alexandre Correia for providing two of the figures.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

Rui Gomes Coelho earned his PhD in Anthropology at Binghamton University and is currently a postdoctoral associate in the Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies program at the Department of Art History, Rutgers University. He is interested in historical archaeology and archaeology of the contemporary. He is currently working on a project entitled Cambedo 1946: Archaeology of Resistance in the Galician-Portuguese Border.

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