Decolonizing a Metropolis: the materialization of the late Portuguese empire through Lisbon’s commercial spaces

Summary

After the formal independence of the Portuguese African colonies between 1974 and 1975, massive numbers of Europeans and settlers of European descent moved to Portugal in one of the most rapid migrations of the century.  This traumatic experience and the problems of redefining a national identity led to the continuous reproduction of an imperial imagination in the old metropolis, but this time without colonies. In this paper I will discuss how old and new urban spaces such as small shops, cafés and other businesses can be understood as physical and social spaces where imperial characteristics were internalized and represented.  These are places where people go to consume food, sleep, socialize, and purchase personal items. Thus, they became not only just places of memory but spaces where an imperial ideology may become intimate through the shape of a physical environment. These places depict the portraits of an old metropolis that needs to be decolonized.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Late Empires: the archaeology of recent colonialism and imperialism - 1860s to the present   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2013

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 488