Institute of European Studies

My objective today is to briefly offer a critical framework that will provide historical, geopolitical, discursive, and cultural coordinates in order to understand the emergence and development of Portuguese-speaking nations as individual entities, but also as a group of nations, varyingly interconnected for several centuries through the experience of colonialism as well as the trans-Atlantic slave trade, but more recently, through globalization. In agreement with Boaventura de Sousa Santos, I argue for the importance of looking at the situatedness of specific colonial and postcolonial experiences that theoretical currents emanating mostly from the Anglophone world since the late twentieth century, as a result of the experience of British colonialism, cannot fully account for in their nuanced differences. Nevertheless, postcolonial theory has provided key insights into European discursive constructions of its others and their deployment in the fields of power (Said), the psychic underpinnings of the relations between colonizers and colonized in the contact zones, with their manifold effects in reference to racial, ethnic, gender, or class differences (Fanon, Memmi, Bhabha, Spivak), or the cultural place of postcolonial diasporic intellectuals in the metropole (Hall, Bhabha), among others. I do not intend to rehearse the main arguments, terminological or others, within the field of postcolonial studies, or for that matter, the arguments in favor or against hegemonic or counter-hegemonic globalization. Instead, I wish to focus on the specificities of the (post)colonial experience as they pertain to the Lusophone world and how they inform the historical and epistemic turn from postcoloniality to globalization em português.