Fictions of a Creole nation: public representations of Portugal's colonial past

Abstract

Portugal had, for more than five centuries, large colonial dependencies. Being the first and the more enduring of European colonial empires, its end, with the concomitant democratization of the country, didn't erase the image of Portugal as an imperial nation. The Empire still stands as a prominent symbolic touchstone through which the national narrative was and still is built upon and sustained. This collective representation of Portugal as an imperial maritime nation was ideologically fostered throught centuries, slowly nurturing a representation of the Portuguese as peaceful, non-racist, softer colonialists, and of their culture as universal, hybrid and somehow Creole, enriched by centuries of colonial contact. This representation was raised as much by the Portuguese as it was by the "colonial subject", being the main example of this the case of yhe Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freire who emphasized the peculiar way the Potuguese brought the West to the tropics: not through industry but instead through culture.