Consensus and Debate in Salazar's Portugal: Visual and Literary Negotiations of the National Text, 1933-1948

by Ellen W. Sapega

Overview

Ellen Sapega’s study documents artistic responses to images of the Portuguese nation promoted by Portugal’s Office of State Propaganda under António de Oliveira Salazar. Combining archival research with current theories informing the areas of memory studies, visual culture, women’s autobiography, and postcolonial studies, the author follows the trajectory of three well-known cultural figures working in Portugal and its colonies during the 1930s and 1940s.

The book begins with an analysis of official Salazarist culture as manifested in two state-sponsored commemorative events: the 1938 contest to discover the “Most Portuguese Village in Portugal” and the 1940 Exposition of the Portuguese-Speaking World. While these events fulfilled their role as state propaganda, presenting a patriotic and unambiguous view of Portugal’s past and present, other cultural projects of the day pointed to contradictions inherent in the nation’s social fabric. In their responses to the challenging conditions faced by writers and artists during this period and the government’s relentless promotion of an increasingly conservative and traditionalist image of Portugal, José de Almada Negreiros, Irene Lisboa, and Baltasar Lopes subtly proposed revisions and alternatives to official views of Portuguese experience.

These authors questioned and rewrote the metaphors of collective Portuguese and Lusophone identity employed by the ideologues of Salazar’s Estado Novo regime to ensure and administer the consent of the national populace. It is evident, today, that their efforts resulted in the creation of vital, enduring texts and cultural artifacts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780271034119
Publisher:	Penn State University Press
Publication date:	12/15/2008
Series:	Penn State Romance Studies , #8
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Ellen W. Sapega is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Staging Memory: “The Most Portuguese Village in Portugal” and the Exposition of the Portuguese World

2. Between Modernity and Tradition: José de Almada Negreiros’s Visual Commentaries on Popular Experience

3. Family Secrets: Irene Lisboa’s Critique of “God, Pátria, and Family”

4. Imperial Dreams and Colonial Nightmares: Baltasar Lopes’s Ambivalent Embrace of Lusotropicalism

Conclusion: Memory and the Collective Imagination Under the Estado Novo and in Its Aftermath

References

Index

Editorial Reviews

I find Professor Sapega’s book informative and persuasive. It begins to fill a long-standing void of research on cultural production in Salazar’s Portugal by presenting some of the discourses on nationalist-imperialist identity disseminated by the regime and analyzing a diverse sample of the artistic and literary responses that they compelled.”

—Ana Paula Ferreira,University of Minnesota

From the Publisher