Empire Found

Front matter

racial identities and coloniality in 21st-century portuguese popular cultures daniel f. silva

Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures

Series Editors L. Elena Delgado, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Niamh Thornton, University of Liverpool

Contents

List of Illustrations Introduction

1. Portuguese Whiteness and Racial Ambiguity in Intellectual Thought during Empire

2. Post-Imperial Orientalism and Portuguese Claims to Late Capitalist Whiteness in José Rodrigues dos Santos's Mystery Thrillers

Introduction

In the spring of 2020, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) published the findings of its country monitoring report on Portugal. The ECRI, part of the Council of Europe (CoE), has conducted this investigation on member states of the CoE every two to three years since 2013, and every four to five years before that, going as far back as 1998. Over the years, the ECRI's reports have consistently pointed out ongoing trends and structures, as well as recommendations to the state in order to address continuing forms of racism and discrimination. From the outset, this very language of racism and discrimination is significantly limited in its operation within the CoE's neoliberal foundations and ideologies. As the project ahead will explore, even so-called progressive discourses against racism within a mainstream Portuguese Left tend to share similar limitations. Nonetheless, the 2020 ECRI report point outs crucial aspects around racial discourses (and their structural existences) in contemporary Portugal that the current project will expound upon, particularly those that reproduce imperial narratives of Portuguese racial formation and exceptionalism.

Most interestingly, the report points out the prevalence of racial violence against minoritized groups and racializing rthetoric by public figures like far-right politician André Ventura in complex relation with ongoing negation of racism in Portuguese society. In addressing some structural issues, the ECRI report recommends greater state and community oversight with regards to police brutality and white supremacist members of local police forces, larger investment in education access to minoritized groups, and the expansion of affordable housing for urban working-class people, particularly of color, to be protected from forced evictions. The full report concludes with what is supposed to be a rebuttal to white supremacist rhetoric in the Portuguese public sphere, positing whiteness as a fantasy, particularly in the case of whiteness Portugal, citing the long history of miscegenation on the Iberian Peninsula, Portuguese imperial expansion, and migration patterns to and from Portugal in recent centuries (“Country Monitoring" 35-36).

This last point, in relation to dominant racial ideologies in Portugal, makes identifying the everyday and ingrained economic, political, and cultural structures of racism an especially murky task. More specifically, it plays more or less directly into conservative and late imperial arguments of Portuguese racial exceptionalism that have long served to legitimize imperial endeavors and sustain the aforementioned racial structures. Following the release of the ECRI report, its historical take on Portuguese whiteness was embraced by left-leaning voices in the media as indeed an adequate response to white supremacist discourses in the public sphere. For instance, sociologist Donizete Rodrigues (2020), in an editorial for news magazine Visão [Vision], agreeably declared, “O “branco” nào existe: a formação étnico-racial da nação portuguesa é resultado de um profundo processo de miscegenação de diferentes povos. O “branco” português é, na verdade, um mestiço” [“The “white person” does not exist: the ethnic and racial formation of the Portuguese nation is the result of a profound process of miscegenation of different people. The “white” Portuguese is, in reality, mixed”] (n.p.). Tellingly, Rodrigues made this closing declaration the title of the piece.

Though the conclusions drawn by Rodrigues —namely that racial orders propping up white superiority are long-held fantasies— differ markedly from those drawn by imperial apologists in government in the 1960s, for instance, his commentary ignores how said apologists denied structural racism in Portugal’s African colonies through this exact historiography. Moreover, Rodrigues's position and that of the ECRI also reveal an important pitfall in mainstream anti-racist discourse that fails to account for the everyday life of white supremacy, ongoing coloniality, and capital. As chapter one will interrogate, the development of Portuguese notions of national whiteness emerges from a public discourse that attempts to reformulate national formation along biological and genetic lines while ignoring or obscuring how whiteness is built and claimed through imperial extraction, exploitation, expropriation, and genocide. In other words, the bio-genetic rebuttal towards whiteness fails to account for its economic and political development and, moreover, its impacts on the racialized lives and lands of non-white people.

For the larger picture of the current project, the ECRI report highlights many of the key conceptual components interrogated here—some of the mechanisms through which colonial and racial structures are reproduced in the post-imperial metropolis, as well as the slippery racial rhetoric of Portuguese ethnic origin/formation and racial exceptionalism. In focusing at length on how these two components are reproduced and the myriad ways in which they are expressed in the Portuguese public sphere and popular cultures, I hope to shed new critical light on how some of the central narratives of Portuguese settler imperialism, officially finished in 1975, continue to underpin Portuguese national identity and individual identity of popular culture figures, while serving and relating to the reproduction of coloniality in the metropolis.

Though these structures and discourses have been critiqued on an array of platforms, including literary production, academic scholarship, and some political discourse, they are nonetheless ubiquitous in and reproductive of many popular cultural forms, genres, and expressions. These include popular literature, daytime television, celebrity cultures, popular music, and football. Important scholarship has deconstructed and rendered crucial theoretical approaches to ongoing expressions of Portuguese racial exceptionalism, multiculturalism, and imperial nostalgia. The ensuing chapters aim to build on, and dialog with, these interventions by de-codifying how the underlying discourses and premises of contemporary cultural production are tied to dominant narratives of Empire. I seek to understand how the most widely consumed (and largely under-studied) cultural products and images in the Portuguese public sphere are couched in imperial history and nostalgia. In consistently fleshing out the imperial underpinnings of an array of cultural products, I look to contribute critical examinations of largely unstudied lines of national expression and negotiation.

Inthe process, my overarching goalis to reframe “post-imperial” Portugal as not merely a body politic and discursive terrain grappling with the legacies and narratives of an imperial past, but more importantly, as a set of material structures (economic, political, and cultural) that are grounded in the racial and gendered logics and mechanisms of coloniality.' On this particular point, it is important to center the voices and epistemologies of racially minoritized subjects inhabiting Portuguese spaces. Chapter three's focus on Black footballers in Portugal does some of this work, especially in the context of football's own socioeconomic industrial complex. In the racialized structures of social (im)mobility, sport becomes one of the few platforms for employment, economic survival, and joy for marginalized people. The flipside is the chain of football labor supply that feeds on these particular structures. Beyond football, cultural production by Black Portuguese, African migrant, and Roma artists and writers have renarrated Portugal along these very terms. In the literary sphere, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida's novels Esse Cabelo [That Hair] (2015), and Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso

1 For more on this topic, see Ferreira; Owen and Klobucka; and Arenas.

[Luanda, Lisbon, Paradise] (2018), among others; as well as Telma Tvon's Um Preto Muito Portugués [A Very Portuguese Black Man] (2017) and Yara Monteiro's Essa Dama Bate Bué! [That Lady Hits Hard!] (2018)—to name only a few— narrate contemporary Portuguese society as a continuity of coloniality.

These are especially rendered legible and knowable in the music of Portuguese rapper Valete. Born Keidje Lima in Lisbon in 1981 to Angolan and São Toméan parents, Valete makes these connections particularly clear in his sarcastically and tragically titled “Quando o Sorriso Morre” [^When the Smile Dies"] (2012). More specifically, his lyrics make the trans-temporal and trans-spatial connection between Portuguese colonial settlement in Africa, formal decolonization, post-independence economic precarity, African migration to the former metropolis, and metropolitan exploitation of this migrant labor force stripped of institutional rights. The song begins with the moment of euphoria surrounding independence:

O colonialismo acabou Independéncia

Os tugas já se foram, bro A terra é nossa.

[Colonialism finished Independence

The Portuguese left, bro

The euphoria, though, makes way to disenchantment stemming from the crumbling of colonial infrastructure following the mass exodus of white colonial high-skilled labor, from which Black residents were barred.

Já nào há empregos Médicos nem professores Nào há quadros formados Não temos doutores. (nada)

Não há comércio, não há serviços Não há nada

Os tugas bazaram

Deixaram toda a gente condenada.

[There are no longer jobs Doctors nor teachers

No more skilled labor

We have no doctors. (nothing)

There are no businesses, no services There is nothing

The Portuguese left

They left us all damned.] (00:33-00:45)

Valete dialogs here with Amílcar Cabral's warning during the anti-colonial armed struggle, thus positing the fight against colonialism as one to be carried out long after independence and that colonialism always leaves the necessary conditions for neocolonialism (Revolution 128). Valete goes on to highlight that the precarity left by Portuguese colonial structures of racial marginalization and exploitation has translated into an exploitable labor force in both the postcolony and in the shape of migrant labor abroad.

Passada história

Eles sáo nossos amigos agora Emigra para Portugal

E comeca uma vida nova

Aquilo é Europa

Vai e tenta ser alguém

[That history is over

The Portuguese are our friends now Migrate to Portugal

And begin a new life

That is Europe

Over there everyone lives well

Escape from this misery

Go make yourself into someone] (1:01-1:12)

The promise and illusion of a better life in a prosperous Europe, packaged as such by colonial educational apparatuses, soon becomes a nightmare of ongoing coloniality.

Isto é Lisboa

Não há sol todos os dias Muito cimento

Flora só em fotografias

Tugas dizem que

não podes ter outro desenlace Para além dos trabalhos precários Porque só tens a quarta classe

Entras às sete horas

Sais quando o sol se ausenta Vais para a tormenta diária Que todo o africano enfrenta

[This is Lisbon

Not all days are sunny Very gray

Only flowery in photos.

You have compatriots building villages that they call ghettos

Go live close to them

They have the script you are to follow.

The Portuguese say that you

have no other way

aside from precarious work

Because you only have a fourth-grade education

You start work at 7am

You leave when the sun leaves

You go through the daily torment That every African faces] (1:29-2:09)

The implied African migrant character in the song's lyrics is more than a persona, but rather an epistemology that revises dominant metropolitan historiographies guilty of proposing facile periodizations of colonial settlement, decolonization, and independence. The song consistently repeats “o colonialismo acabou” [“colonialism has ended”] to articulate the absurdity and theoretical insufficiency of hegemonic historicization that posits colonialism as something that abruptly ends. Rather, it is a political, cultural, economic reality and series of mechanisms that are reinvented with periods building on one another rather than erasing one another. It is in relation to this continuity of coloniality in the metropolis that I will examine parts of its everyday cultural life in popular media, giving life to and aiding in the misrecognition of colonial realities. This terrain of cultural production permits, moreover, its implied white Portuguese audience discursive space to imagine itself inhabiting a national public sphere and imperial historiography in which this whiteness is codified in global contexts, participating in global histories of Empire as well as narratives of Portuguese imperial and racial exceptionalism.

The continuity and brutality of Portuguese colonialism was legitimized during its last two centuries by seemingly competing narratives of civilizational endeavour (the civilizing mission of Europe in relation to its colonized peoples) and nonviolent colonial relations built on a racially and culturally hybrid Portuguese ethos that supposedly permitted the Portuguese to easily adapt to the tropics and peacefully interact with its inhabitants. The former was used to legitimize, in the face of international pressure and denunciations, the continued use of slave labor African colonies, positing unpaid labour as an instrument of “teaching” colonial subjects the cultural value of work as a metric of European capitalist civilization. The latter represents another instantiation of legitimizing rhetoric most popularized following the Second World War. While most of Europe began processes of decolonization in Africa and Asia, the Portuguese fascist state, Estado Novo, began to embrace narratives of Portuguese pluri-continentality, multiracial syncretism, and amicable race relations on the international stage in order to defend its resistance to decolonization.

More than a rhetoric of colonial legitimation, these narratives inscribed and formulated a Portuguese cultural and national ethos that was disseminated not only in political spheres, but more broadly in cultural production and mass media. The discourses of a Portuguese civilizing mission, predicated on Portuguese claims to whiteness and participation in its global power, overlapped in complex ways with historical articulations of racial and cultural hybridity as the foundation of "Portugueseness" and its imperial expansion—a supposed product of its inherent necessity for intercultural contact. For example, one of the most cited contributors to this narrative of "Portugueseness," Brazilian sociologist and anthropologist Gilberto Freyre, wrote, “ am one of those who attribute the ability of the Portuguese to unite themselves with the tropics for love, not convenience, to the close contacts between the Portuguese in Europe and the Moors" ("Portuguese" 45). Freyre was merely one of an existing line of Lusophone intellectuals, dating back to the first half of the nineteenth century, that posited “Portugueseness” as a racial and ethnic hybrid formation, one occupying an interstitial space between Europe and the colonized Global South (before it was named such). Such narratives of geo-cultural hybridity also dovetailed with the re-appropriation of symbols and of an imperial golden age (roughly 1415-1580), known in contemporary Portugal as “Os Descobrimentos" [*The Discoveries"], into disseminated iconography, literary celebration, and public education.

By examining a range of contemporary cultural production (literature, intellectual thought, television fiction, musical production, and celebrity culture), Empire Found examines how these narratives of Portuguese hybridity, alongside imperial drives toward global presence and inter-cultural contact, inform how different Portuguese cultural producers position themselves. Such producers include not only individual writers, musicians, and celebrities, but also state entities such as the state-owned media company Rádio e Televisão de Portugal (Radio and Television of Portugal) (RTP), the State Secretariat of Portuguese Communities, and the Camões Institute that embrace and reproduce imperial historical narratives and neo-expansionist views of contemporary Portuguese nationhood as not confined to the western strip of the Iberian Peninsula. To this end, such entities and other dispersed cultural producers have rendered Portugal and “Portugueseness” as a continued global presence by way of its imperial past (represented by Portuguese-speaking enclaves and nations in Africa, Asia, and the Americas) and dispersal of Portuguese emigrant communities abroad.

In other words, contemporary Portuguese globalism and its narratives are performed and carried out in different and overlapping ways by an array of voices and social actors articulating historical and linguistic ties to former colonial spaces, shared cultural origins with the Atlantic South, and the symbolic/political inclusion of Portuguese emigrants around the world. These articulations serve to centralize the Portuguese nation-sign in relation to the cultural, economic, and political hierarchies at work in the European Union as well as postcolonial flows of late capital. For many contemporary producers, such as musicians and celebrities (born after the end of Portuguese empire), this Portuguese global presence, cultural hybridity, and transnational connectivity serve as the foundation to articulate the marketability of their products and themselves as international brands. The fundamental objective of Empire Found is to interrogate the historical depths of such contemporary articulations and what they mean for post-imperial Portugal and current notions of Portuguese cultural identity. Imperial discourses and narratives continue to inform how the nation and Portuguese bodies are represented and positioned in the post-imperial present. I argue that these implied or overt historical dialogs carried out through cultural production are integral to the very reproduction of the nation-state apparatus in the face of post-imperial economic, political, and demographic shifts that, to varying degrees, threaten the normalized and accepted ideological fabric and self-representations that undergird the nation and its social order.

Chapter Breakdown

Chapter one, “Portuguese Whiteness and Racial Ambiguity in Intellectual Thought during Empire,” lays the foundation for the proceeding examination of contemporary discourses of Portuguese whiteness, cultural hybridity, and imperial desire, by tracing a brief genealogy of such narratives in the context of Portuguese imperialism. I will thus interrogate the parameters of Portuguese national and cultural formation as articulated by an array of Lusophone intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including Alexandre Herculano, Antero de Quental, Sílvio Romero, Teixeira de Pascoaes, Jorge Dias, Almir de Andrade, and Gilberto Freyre. Such thinkers, I argue, placed Portugal and “Portugueseness” in ambivalent positions regarding Europeanness (and its racial, political, and cultural parameters at this time) and imperial endeavor. This is of particular relevance in the context of imperial decay and increasing marginality in world capitalism in the nineteenth century, spurred on by the independence of Brazil and European scramble for Africa that saw Portugal “lose” significant amounts of territory to which it laid claim.

These perils of the time led to a reassessment of Portugal's place in relation to the formations of whiteness and Europeanness of northern imperial neighbors, leading to collective nostalgia for an imperial golden age (1415-1580), alongside re-examinations of Portuguese ethnic formation. This turbulent period brought forth a resignification of Portuguese cultural identity that increasingly situated the seven-century presence of Islamic rule in the Iberian Peninsula as a more central element in the formation of “Portugueseness” as a Mediterranean entity, distinct from central and northern Europe. These revisions also dovetailed with European and North American cultural and scientific thought that located southern/Latin Europe as residing on the fringes of whiteness (Montesquieu, Chevalier, Ripley), further explored in chapter five. Throughout the remaining chapters, however, I aim to lay bare the ways in which these discourses nonetheless overlapped with anti-Black and anti-Arab discourses and structures of dispossession and exploitation.

As Portuguese imperial endeavor was economically revitalized in the twentieth century with the intensified colonization of African colonies (especially Angola and Mozambique), twentieth-century thinkers ultimately legitimized colonial presence in the face of international pressure to decolonize by taking narratives of Portuguese Islamic and European hybridity to argue for Portuguese expansion as a "natural embrace of the tropics" rather than an apparatus of economic exploitation. Furthermore, the supposedly interstitial place of Portuguese culture, between Europe and the tropics, meant that racial categories of colonial power were not rigidly deployed. In sifting through this array of intellectual discourses, which came to inform negotiations of national and ethnic identity in the public sphere, we get a vision of Portugueseness and its racial parameters as historically contextualized discursive edifices always in conjunction to the desires and exigencies of empire and capitalism.

The proceeding chapter, “Post-Imperial Orientalism and Portuguese Claims to Late Capitalist Westernness in José Rodrigues dos Santos's Mystery Thrillers," reflects on a relatively under-studied trope in post-imperial Portuguese cultural production: the deployment of orientalist signifiers and imagery when integrating Middle Eastern and Arab spaces and bodies into literary diegeses. While discourses of historical ties to the Arab world have served to legitimize imperial endeavors, circulating in a more limited yet present fashion today, highly visible cultural products have intentionally participated in Cold War and post-9/11 orientalist tropes in ways that racially (re)situate Portugueseness as part of the cultural, political, and economic web of Westernness. The chapter thus critically examines the bestselling mystery thrillers of writer and journalist José Rodrigues dos Santos, which follow his recurring protagonist Tomás Noronha.

Noronha is a Portuguese university professor and cryptologist, much in the vein of Robert Langdon, the recurring character of American author Dan Brown's mystery thrillers. Also, similar to Langdon, Noronha works to uncover some of the West's greatest secrets and help save contemporary civilization (a world order established by Western imperialism) from its supposed greatest threats such as climate change and Islamic fundamentalism. The chapter pays particular attention to two novels from his mystery thriller series, A Fórmula de Deus [The Einstein Enigma] (2006), Fúria Divina [Divine Fury] (2009), and Vaticanum [2016] in which Noronha is contracted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to help decipher and foil secret Islamic terrorist missions to attack metropolitan and religious centers of the West. Contextualizing these two novels in relation to Rodrigues dos Santos's larger oeuvre, Largue that his thrillers articulate a pop-literary brand of Portuguese identity within late capital that is politically aligned with United States imperialism and hegemonic Western divisions of Orient and Occident—a stance seemingly at odds with the rhetoric of Portuguese hybridity that blurs cultural and racial divisions of bodies and spaces. The orientalist discourses found in Rodrigues dos Santos's works fundamentally serve to convey Portuguese agency in continued projects of Western imperialism, thus seeking, I argue, to place “Portugueseness” into dominant global conceptualizations of whiteness in opposition to Portugal's cultural and economic marginality within the European Union and semi-peripheral status in the racialized world system.

The third chapter of this section charts a brief history of media constructions and representations of Afro-Portuguese soccer players within mainstream narratives of Portuguese multiculturalism and multiraciality. Titled “Football, Empire, and Racial Capitalism in Portugal," the chapter's point of departure will be the emergence of Black footballers in Portugal within the context of Portuguese colonialism in Africa. The formation of football clubs in Portuguese colonies, namely Angola, Cabo Verde, and Angola, became yet another mechanism of labor extraction. Star players such as Eusébio (Eusébio da Silva Ferreira) and their exploits on the field, especially during the 1966 World Cup, were signified as exemplary of Portuguese colonial exceptionalism—this at a time when the Portuguese Estado Novo continued its proscribed colonial wars in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique. In this way, Eusébio's Portugueseness was repeatedly emphasized (while his Blackness was also reified) in the public sphere, as part of a reformulated historicization of Empire based on inclusive race relations whereby Portugal's African colonies were renamed "overseas provinces," part of a multiracial and multi-continental Portugal.

More recently, more than 40 years following the end of the Estado Novo regime in 1974 and official Portuguese colonial domination abroad, Black Portuguese players have become fixtures in Portuguese football clubs and the national team. The Portuguese men's national football team's success as winner of the 2016 UEFA European Championship coincides with a large influx of immigrants into Portugal from former African colonies, especially from Angola, Cabo Verde, and Guinea-Bissau. This chapter will thus consider how this visibility of Black Portuguese subjects relates to larger forms of systemic anti-Black racism and the continuities of racial capitalism in the former metropolis, while also contributing to the continued hegemonic historicization of Portugal's colonial past as non-racist. In this regard, the chapter will also shed light on the continued racialization of Black Portuguese players that operates under narratives of Portuguese multiculturalism. Although more overt expressions of racism have been publicly condemned by soccer's national and international governing bodies, as with racist chants and the throwing of bananas at Black players in soccer stadiums, these pernicious mechanisms of othering are sustained by codified racist discourses in everyday sports media.

By interfacing public articulation of migrant experiences of such athletes (and broader Black communities in Portugal) in their everyday performance of identity on the field and in social media, the chapter also interrogates the possibilities of decolonial mapping of (counter) Lusophone connectivity evoked by athletes. Numerous footballers of migrant/African backgrounds have been visible renegotiators of dominant mono-nationalist frameworks, producing a particular epistemology against the racial underpinnings, limitations, and misrecognitions of common European multicultural narratives. In other words, such cultivations of intersubjective terrains operate against the anti-Black foundations of Portuguese national claims to whiteness and Europeanness that posit, presuppose, and ensnare Black bodies as “migrant” outsiders. Implied in this epistemic resistance, the racial struggle for recognition of full and equitable citizenship in Portugal and Europe need not erase diasporic histories and terrains of intersubjective, political, and affective ties to Africa.

The following chapter, “Color Games: Anti-Blackness, Racial Plasticity, and Celebrity Culture,” aims to explore how Portuguese celebrities that benefit from long-established economic, political, and cultural structures of native and white privilege have racially and ethnically signified themselves away from whiteness, at strategic moments, on social media. In drawing on and examining specific examples of these, the chapter will pay particular attention to how these reproduce and seek to justify themselves via imperial narratives of Portuguese racial exceptionalism and syncretism. Such digital platforms allow celebrities to render themselves as commodities directly to consumers, acquiring followers and subsequently increased visibility, which in turn often leads to more acting roles, recording opportunities (for musicians), and advertising revenue. Social media platforms offer users the possibility of a complex blend of visual and textual meanings, in addition to collective public inscriptions of images via comment sections and replies. In this regard, social media allows for collective participation in the trans-racial signification of particular celebrities.

For instance, throughout the summer of 2018 (in the Northern Hemisphere) Portuguese actress Sofia Ribeiro (born 1984) posted numerous photos of herself on her Instagram account in swimsuits in tropical beach settings with the hashtags “#gabriela” and “#cordecanela” (“#cinnamoncolor”), with one captioned as “Gabriela, cor de canela, veio a janela espreitar” [“Gabriela, of cinnamon skin, came to the window to peek” ] in reference to the Brazilian female mulatto titular character of Brazilian writer Jorge Amado’s novel Gabriela, Cravo e Canela [Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon] (1958), and of the later soap opera Gabriela (1975) and film of the same name (1983). The soap opera, Gabriela, was the first ever aired in Portugal to much acclaim and popularity, in 1977, three years after the fall of the Estado Novo and two after the fall of the Portuguese empire in Africa. In a complex trans-Atlantic postcolonial flow of cultural meanings, the hypersexualized mixed-race character became a collectively consumed symbol of the exceptionalist legacies of Portuguese colonialism and its alleged nonracist nature. Originally deployed by Amado as a celebrated national and colonial product of Brazilian miscegenation and racial democracy, the hypersexualized and hyper-consumed mulata body becomes, for Ribeiro, a racial framework through which to narrate her body while positioning it in relation to the tropical visual background and dominant versions of Portuguese imperial history. In assuming Gabriela's racial corporality, Ribeiro also reproduces the dominant historical view that equates such supposed racial fluidity and ambiguity as proof of Portuguese nonracist social organization, both in its colonial past, and in the current multiracial metropolis.

The chapter will also consider how the central racial, gendered, and sexual discourses surrounding Gabriela have become part of the quotidian and normalized patriarchal rhetoric surrounding women's bodies. Enacting trans-raciality, moreover, does not necessarily imply an overt racial identification with a category other than whiteness, but suggests a particular form of access to and appropriation of racial otherness to position the body in mass media and neoliberal cultures of consumption. It is an access facilitated, if not granted, by the supposed fluidity and romanticized erasures of racial categories that, to varying degrees, guided and legitimized the administration of colonial power and became culturally canonized in narratives of Portuguese colonial exceptionalism. In contrast with the signification of white celebrities like Ribeiro, the chapter will also interrogate the repercussions of this movement across racial signifiers for the social existence of nonwhite bodies in Portugal and the broader "Lusophone world" as it is constructed by entities of cultural production and mediation.

Titled *Latin Reinventions: Contemporary Portuguese Singers, Latinidad, and Latinx Musical Forms," the fifth and final chapter interrogates a growing trend in popular music sung by Portuguese artists and some of Portuguese descent: namely their experimentation with and insertions into globalized and contemporarily hybridized musical genres of Latin America and the Caribbean. Since the early 2010s, artists such as Luciana Abreu, Ana Malhoa, Lucenzo, and Kátia Aveiro have all released music sung in Spanish and/or associated with genres that circulate globally under “Latin” categories. According to their lyrical content and interviews, this insertion into such genres is not viewed by such artists as a casual attempt to enter new geo-cultural and ethnic markets while rebranding themselves in the national public sphere (where they are already known) through the growing popularity of reggaeton, electro-reggaeton, Latin house, hip house, and other genres. Rather, for the artists in question, this movement is articulated largely as a result of a trans-continental ethnic heritage associated with "Portugueseness," that posits Portuguese history firmly within discourses of Latinidad and its earlier incarnation of Latinité. As Luciana Abreu sings in the opening lines of her single in Spanish, “El Camarón" [“The Shrimp"] of 2017, “Traigo la música latina en las venas" [^I carry Latin music in my veins"]. Meanwhile, one of Kátia Aveiro's singles that initiated her venture into “Latin” genres in 2014 was tellingly titled "Latina de Cuerpo y Alma” [Latina of Body and Soul].

This will lead to a historical genealogy of Portugal's place in conceptualizations of Latinicity, as a trans-Atlantic entity, over the last two centuries, contextualizing such musical works in relation to the intellectual production of Michel Chevalier, Jules Michelet, and Gilberto Freyre. More than trendy appropriations of and insertions into Latinidad for marketing and consumption purposes, such artists enact a historicization of Portuguese cultural “origins” and heritage that articulate a strategic cultural bond to Latin American and Spanish-language markets, while still conveying the historical agency of Roman imperialism as a primary unifying force of interracial and intercultural encounters. For Portuguese intellectuals and scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, like Matias Aires and José Soares da Silva, "Latinidade" was a terrain of heritage into which Portuguese subjects were to be placed via education and that served to separate Portugueseness from the history of Islamic colonization at the hands of the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties. For contemporary Portuguese recording artists, the articulation of Latinidad has become an expression of Portuguese cultural, ethnic, and historical ties to the nonetheless exoticized tropics. Despite evoking Latinidad as a terrain of hybridized cultural forms and identities engendered throughout the history of Western expansion, trans-Atlantic slave trade, and colonial and post-independence racial hierarchies of power, Europeanness (as developed through Roman power) continues to be the implied site of cultural agency and historical origin. At the same time, Latinicity is articulated by these contemporary artists in question as an agglomeration of racialized and gendered stereotypes often placed on Latin American bodies, with Portuguese access to these justified through blurry references to Latinidad and Latinité.