Annotations
Since I can remember, my family had a glass cup with a cartoon called Gil at home. This was the mascot of the Expo 98 meant as a reference to Gil Eanes, the navigator from Lagos, that passed through Western Sahara.
Expo 98 was a world exhibition whose theme was “The Oceans, a Heritage for the Future”, chosen in part to commemorate 500 years of Portuguese maritime expansion.
Citations
“On 12 June 1985, the Treaty of Accession of Portugal to the European Economic Community (EEC) was signed at the Jerónimos Monastery.2 In 1986, the National Commission for the Commemoration of Portuguese Discoveries was created and its activity continued until 2002, representing a huge state effort to revise the historical record and restore historiographical legitimacy to the period of Portuguese maritime expansion. This endeavor would culminate in the commemoration of five hundred years of the “Discoveries” and the staging of the 1998 Lisbon World Exposition (Expo’98) with the theme “Oceans." From then on, two perspectives would be key in the composition of Portugal’s memorial landscape with respect to the country’s imperial past. First, a pedagogical perspective on the history of the nation, conveyed by the most diverse sectors of Portuguese society with an interest in signaling the full democratic inclusion of the country in the European context. Second, a perspective of commodification, in which the past gains an exchange value in the cultural and tourist consumption market.”
“At the opening ceremony of the Eleventh Web Summit in Lisbon, in early November 2019, the mayor of Lisbon, Fernando Medina, offered an astrolabe to Paddy Cosgrave, the founder of the technology and entrepreneurship conference. As an instrument used by the navigators during the so-called Portuguese “Discoveries,” the astrolabe possessed a symbolism that Medina emphasized at the time: Lisbon was the capital of the world five centuries ago, this was the starting point for routes to discover new worlds, new people, new ideas. From Lisbon departed a great adventure that connected the human race. . . . Today it is you, the engineers, the entrepreneurs, the creators, the innovators, the start-ups, all the companies. (Lusa 2017c)”
“This narrative started to be regenerated in the mid-1980s, on the basis of old imperial myths woven since nineteenth-century liberalism and the First Republic (1910–1926) and intensified during the Estado Novo (1933–1974), but more recently has become adapted to the new postcolonial languages and the symbolic demands of European integration (Peralta 2017). (…) But as the young Portuguese democracy was being successfully implemented and the country was on its way toward eventually acceding to the European Economic Market in 1986, Portuguese national identity started to be reworked to fit into the new political and cultural context of liberal democracies. In this way, Portugal’s imperial history began to serve once again as a chief rhetorical tool for locating Portugal in a new space of European identity, a space now dominated by notions of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism.”
“This rehabilitation began in 1983 with the inclusion of the Jerónimos Monastery and the Belém Tower in UNESCO’s World Heritage List. UNESCO justifies this classification with the observation that the two monuments “reflect the power, knowledge and courage of the Portuguese people at a time when they consolidated their presence and domain of intercontinental trade routes” and recall “the pioneer role the Portuguese had in the 15th and 16th centuries in cre- ating contacts, dialogue and interchange among different cultures” (UNESCO, n.d.). Since UNESCO is an institution that represents a culture of peace, democ- racy, and cooperation in the world”
“the temporally and spatially extended discursive realm wherein the strug- gle for control of peoples’ memories and the formation of nationalist myths is debated, contested and subverted incessantly. The mythscape is the page upon which the multiple and often conflicting nationalist narratives are (re) written; it is the perpetually mutating repository for the presentation of the past for the purposes of the present. (Bell 2003, 66) According to this reading, national identities are constructed, debated, negoti- ated, and contested in specific instances by resorting to a series of preestablished myths. The original foundational myth or system of myths is rewritten over time and continually updated as current circumstances change, even though it may maintain its vitality. This makes it possible for a relatively unchanging structure of national myths to retain its constitutive coherence as it is constantly reworked and adapted according to the identity needs and ever-changing meanings given to the past by each present circumstance (Koshar 2000).”
”(…) Portuguese Lusofonia. Here, the negative connotations associated with the exploitative nature of empires are reformulated to appear beneficial to both colonizers and colonized, and are usually articulated around ideas of cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and intercultural dialogue.”
“The historical relevance of Expo’98 therefore coincided with Vasco da Gama’s sea voyage to India, where he arrived on 22 May 1498, thus opening up new per-spectives for economic and commercial relations at that time, and promoting a process of intercultural exchange, which had major consequences for humankind.”
“the exhibition updated earlier imperial discourse and dressed it in modern clothes by using oceans as thematic material and relating it to issues of sustainable management and environmental protection, which are the contemporary concerns of so-called modern, developed countries.”
“It was essential, when defining the concept, to understand that the Lisbon exhibition should distinguish itself from other recent events of the same type by the attention given to its main theme.”
”The sea (or oceans) as the route to cultural encounters on a global scale and as a metaphor for a modern nation that is multifaceted and tolerant was converted into the chief rhetorical tool to locate Portugal in a new European identity space. This metaphor strategically publicizes an image of a modern and progressive country, one that is not stuck in its own past but that, then and now, is essentially expansionist, modern, and enterprising, a reading very accommodating to the neoliberal agendas with which the country’s representatives were aiming to dialogue.”
“To evoke the pioneering and decisive contribution of the Portuguese Discoveries to the process of European expansion, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which led to an improved understanding of Man and the configuration of the planet, by projecting it into the future; ”
"Under the sign of the oceans, Expo’98 bridged the past—the Portuguese navigations and the maritime explorations—to the future: environmental concerns and oceanographic research."
“History is now used by the democratic power as a mere reference for cultural and tourist marketing, stripped as much as possible of its ideological burden, (…)”
“In those negotiations, the image of an imperialism without colonies emerges, picturing the country as having pioneered cultural encounters around the globe according to its new self-conceived position within a modern, democratic, multicultural, and cosmopolitan Europe (…)”
”(…) a refusal to accept the symbolic loss of the empire that had previously provided a sense of coherence to national culture.”
”(…) although there has been an increasing tendency toward the commodification of the national past (which contributes to a deflation of its ideological content), areas of contestation and articulation of counter- memories with regard to the legacy of the country’s imperial past have also emerged, especially in recent years. Calls for a more problematizing representation of Portugal’s colonial past reached unprecedented proportions in 2017. In that year, the Testimonials of Slavery: African Memory series of exhibitions was organized as part of the Lisbon 2017 Ibero-American Capital of Culture agenda (Lusa 2017b). This agenda also included the exhibition Racism and Citizenship, held in the Monument to the Discoveries (Padrão dos Descobrimentos 2017).”
“One of these disputes was triggered during the state visit of the President of the Portuguese Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, to Senegal in April 2017. Specifically, at the end of his visit to a former slave-trading post on the island of Gorée, where Pope John Paul II had apologized for slavery, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa stated that Portugal recognized the injustice of slavery when it abolished the institution in part of its territory “by the hand of the Marquis of Pombal in 1761” (Lusa 2017a). In response to these statements, an open letter was pub- lished in the newspaper Diário de Notícias on 19 April 2017, entitled “A Return to the Past in Gorée: Not in Our Name” and signed by numerous academics and intellectuals, who thus repudiated the “politics of memory advocated by the political powers in Portugal” in relation to the country’s legacy of colonialism (Diário de Notícias 2017). Another controversy that arose that year was associated with the inauguration of a statue in Largo Trindade Coelho, in Lisbon, to honor Father António Vieira (…) because António Vieira accepted slavery, albeit selectively, and, secondly, because of the sculptural design chosen for the statue, which depicts the clergyman in a clear position of dominance over indigenous figures who are represented as children”
”in Europe as a whole, which, as Benoit De L’Estoile (2008) has claimed, was shaped both objectively and subjectively by the imperial experience. As scholars, it is our task to continue to observe and analyze the unfolding of events that point to the renewed ways in which individuals and communities make sense of times past and present.”