(Re)imagining African Independence

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Figures

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Acknowledgements

This book assembles, among others, a number of essays presented at the international conference Liberation Struggles, the Portuguese ‘End of Empire’ and the Birth (through Images) of the African Nations, held on 27 and 28 January 2016 at the Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures (CFAC), the University of Reading, and at King’s College, London, Camões Centre for Portuguese Language and Culture. We would like to thank Paulo de Medeiros and Cláudia Pazos Alonzo for their kind invitation to publish these contributions, as well as the CFAC’s director, Lúcia Nagib, and the Camões Centre for Portuguese Language and Culture’s director, João Paulo Silvestre, for their kind and active support.

Special thanks are due to Manuel Santos Maia, José da Costa Ramos, Catarina Laranjeiro, Nataša Petresin Bachelez and L’Internationale, Rute Magalhães, João Silva, Jorge António and the Instituto Angolano de Cinema, Audiovisual e Multimédia, Pedro Pimenta, Inês Cordeiro Dias, António Saraiva, Rodrigo Dias, Nuno Conde, Margaret Dickinson and Polly Gaster. ← xiii | xiv →

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LÚCIA NAGIB

Foreword

It is my great pleasure and honour to be able to write the foreword for this stupendous collection. (Re)Imagining African Independence: Film, Visual Arts and the Fall of the Portuguese Empire breaks new ground for offering, for the first time, an overarching and in-depth analysis of how Portuguese colonialism in Africa has been and continues to be represented in images. More importantly, it reveals the crucial role of cinema and photography in the very process of colonization and independence. Film was a key medium for the Estado Novo regime in Portugal to spread its patriotic and racist ideology from the 1930s onwards. And film made the ideal, and much censored, means through which anticolonial activists from both Africa and Portugal raised their voice against the oppressor, in particular from the 1970s onwards. The contributors to this book left no stone unturned in their effort to piece together the kaleidoscope that reflects the role of film and photography in the Portuguese colonial and post-colonial times. The amount of information gathered is truly staggering, but displayed with reader-friendly organization by both the authors and the editors.

Portugal prides itself not only in its extremely original cinematic production but also in the excellent scholarship produced on it, both locally and internationally. This is because both are steeped in a well-established film culture that includes one of the best film archives in the world, the Cinemateca Portuguesa. Its director, José Manuel Costa, is one of the book’s contributors, alongside some of the very best researchers and creative minds in the world devoted to Portuguese film and photography, starting with the editors, Maria do Carmo Piçarra and Teresa Castro. I had the privilege of acting as Piçarra’s supervisor during her six-month stint as visiting researcher at the Centre for Film Aesthetics and Cultures (CFAC), University of Reading, UK, supported by an award from FCT [the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation]. An indefatigable researcher of representations ← xv | xvi → of colonialism in Europe, Piçarra gave, despite the brevity of her period with us, abundant proof of the international relevance of her findings on the Portuguese case, not least by organizing a major international conference entitled Liberation Struggles, the Portuguese ‘End of Empire’ and the Birth (through Images) of the African Nations, held on 27 and 28 January 2016 at CFAC, the University of Reading, and King’s College, London, supported by the Gulbenkian Foundation and the Camões Centre for Portuguese Language and Culture. The present volume is a selection of proceedings from this extraordinary event, which allowed for paradigm-shifting ideas and artistic objects to circulate within and beyond the academic confines. Film buffs and scholars around the world are familiar with the outputs of cinematic giants from Portugal, such as Manoel de Oliveira, João César Monteiro, Pedro Costa, Miguel Gomes, Margarida Cardoso and Teresa Villaverde, several of whom have devoted themselves to the reworking of the Portuguese colonial past. Less known is, however, the tradition behind this unique and strongly political cinematic production, a gap that this volume has come to fill. Its purpose is not merely accusatory, but rather to face head-on the complexities entailed by the colonial process. Key to all contributors’ research is the careful scrutiny of their own subjectivities and historical and/or generational ties with previous colonizers and perpetrators. Indeed, some of the most poignant testimonies come from artists who examine an inherited guilt from parents who had engaged, willingly or not, in colonial wars.

This volume teaches us facts, but it also teaches us how and where to look for a more faithful and just reconstruction of history.