The Other in Us Representation of Black African Identity in Portuguese Social Space

摘要

This paper brings together three sites of contemporary Portugal to search for the commonality in how black African identity is imagined and represented in Portuguese social space: a 1940s Nation-as-Empire theme park (Coimbra, central Portugal), a sixteenth-century black African slave burial site (Lagos, southern Portugal), and the present-day Alfragide police station (Lisbon metropolitan area). I argue that the three sites and subject matters, although separated by decades if not centuries, are all part of the same continuum of the imagined "absence of presence" of black African slavery in Portuguese social space. I also show that the proper understanding of any of the three is enhanced by contemplating the other two.