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e-Journal of Portuguese History

versão On-line ISSN 1645-6432

e-JPH vol.16 no.1 Porto  2018

https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0CJ8C0K 

INSTITUTIONS & RESEARCH

 

Introduction

Filipa Lowndes Vicente1

1 University of Lisbon, Institut of Social Sciences, Lisbon, Portugal. E-mail: filipa.vicente@ics.ulisboa.pt

 

These three articles written by Nicolás Barbosa López, Pedro Lopes de Almeida, and Torin Spangler began as essays written for the course I taught at Brown University in the Fall Semester of 2016-2017, as Visiting Professor at the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies (FLAD/Brown Visiting Professorship). The course was titled "Travels and Exhibitions: writing, collecting and displaying the world in the 19th and 20th centuries" and addressed the entangled histories of traveling, exhibiting, collecting, writing and photographing within different geographical spaces. From Brazil to Angola and Goa, the spaces and times explored through the thirteen weeks of the Course could be placed within the wider context of the history of Portuguese modern colonialism.

The University, the Department, the Students

Brown is a university with a Liberal Arts college and all courses are open to all students (all fields of knowledge, be it at the undergraduate or graduate levels, even though the more advanced ones have established pre-requisites or require permission from the instructor). This openness, allowing students to explore an immense realm of intellectual interests is what makes special places of Brown and other similar North-American universities. Even if this can also mean an additional challenge to the faculty, who has to engage with heterogeneity in their classes, the overall result is enriching to all.

The four graduate students who enrolled and completed my course were a very homogenous group, though, something that also facilitated the project of developing their written assignments into scholarly articles. On the one hand, they were all in the early stages of their PhDs (which, in most universities in the USA, means that they have not yet decided on the topic of their theses. At this stage, they are encouraged to explore different subjects in seminars. From the second year onwards, they also work as teaching assistants). While on the other hand, and despite the diversity of their backgrounds from literature to media studies, they all shared the same intellectual and critical engagement, which allowed for a rewarding teaching and learning experience for all of us.

Despite their different origins and first languages — English from the US, Spanish from Colombia, and Continental Portuguese — all students could read Portuguese and some used this skill in the sources they used for their final papers. Therefore, apart from the need for Portuguese scholars to engage in English-speaking conversations if they want to be heard more broadly, there are also benefits from the kind of work and approaches foreign Portuguese speakers can pursue. A Department such as the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown is a rich center for Portuguese literature, history, anthropology and social sciences,

The evaluation of the students' performance encompassed different dimensions, research tasks, reading and discussing, oral presentations and also written assignments, a shorter one that consisted of writing a review of a book of his choice (a revised version of these four reviews were published in Análise Social (nº 223, vol. LII, 2017) under the a special section titled "Travels and exhibitions in the making of national or imperial identities", and a longer one, a 25-page research paper on a subject of their choice, related to the general subject of the course which has resulted in this section for the E-jph.

The Course: "Travels and Exhibitions: writing, collecting and displaying the world in the 19th and 20th centuries"

A political, cultural and intellectual history was intertwined in the practices of circulating, collecting and display of objects, images and ideas and the practices of producing different types of knowledge, written and visual. Throughout the course we engaged in discussions related to the relationship between knowledge and colonial and national contexts; the interdependence between ideological agendas and exhibition and collecting projects; the affirmation of national and imperial identities through spaces of visual and material knowledge; the ways in which different elites were involved in colonial scientific and development projects and the public and private dissemination of knowledge; travel as metaphor and photography and exhibitions as a transgression of time and space. Torin Spengler's article, “Whose Colonial Project? Angolan Elites and the Colonial Exhibitions of the 1930s: Notes on the Special Magazine Edition of A Província de Angola, August 15, 1934”, is a good example of all these approaches, while reinforcing the need to find those "voices from the colonies", not always in tune with those "voices from the metropolis", even when belonging to privileged white settlers.

These ideas, explored in the course, were discussed through some specific comparative and transnational case-studies: the appropriation and circulation of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira's Brazilian collections between Brazil, Lisbon and Paris from the 18th to the 19th centuries; the botanist Welwisch's natural history expedition in Angola in the mid-19th century; photography in Angola and in Goa in the late 19th century and in the early 20th century; the European grand tours of King D. Pedro V of Portugal and of his Uncle D. Pedro II, the Emperor of Brazil within the second half of the 19th century; Portuguese participation in Universal and Colonial Exhibitions; Goa's intellectual and cultural history, in its relationships with British Colonial India as well as Portugal and Europe; Colonial comparisons between British and Portuguese African and Indian colonial territories; or travelling and travel writing by women across different frontiers.

Beyond those Portuguese masculine elites and those non-Portuguese men who lived or worked in territories under Portuguese hegemony — embodied as travelers, collectors, writers, exhibition organizers, photographers — we also analysed the places and agencies of non-white, non-Portuguese intellectual producers from those spaces under Portuguese colonial governments. We were also attentive to women's public imprint within a public sphere, mainly through writing and publication, and Nicolás Barbosa López's article — “The Exiled Insider: The Ambivalent Reception of Maria Graham's Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (1824)” — on Maria Graham's writings and reception within various contexts, is a good example of the many women that by the 19th century were publishing books and newspaper articles. Not all writing formats were available to them, though, and travel writing became one of the most accessible genres for women. Not threatening to the male-dominated scientific fields, travel writing, with its subjective and heterogeneous character, became the ideal realm for women to leave their mark within all possible subjects.

In the article, “The past is a foreign photo: image and travel writing in the Benguela Railway. Angola, 1920-1930”, Pedro Lopes de Almeida also addresses travel writing and travel photography. Through his text, he explores the ways in which visual and written knowledge production should be thought about together, as well as revealing how the frontiers between different national colonial projects have to be crossed.

The challenges of placing the Lusophone case in a broader global context, both historically and theoretically, were also addressed in all the cases studied. Having in mind that the British Imperial world dominates the historiography on such subjects, we searched for ways of placing the Portuguese case within a broader context. Circulation, mobility, but also the crossing of frontiers between geographies that tend to remain historiographically apart, were at the center of our reflections.

All three articles explore how the practices of writing, photographing and exhibiting — the production and circulation of different kinds of knowledge between different national and colonial frontiers — was intertwined with the making and unmaking of colonial and national projects.

 

Copyright 2018, ISSN 1645-6432

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018

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