Muslims in Portugal: History, Historiography, Citizenship

2010

A m s t e r d a m U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s

Lusotopie, 2007

2014

More than 40 years after the end of Portuguese colonialism, those who migrated from the former colonies in Africa to Portugal remain silenced and forgotten as if they were not part of a colonial project that forged an imperial nation overseas. At least a third of these subjects were actually descendants of white Portuguese people as well as of populations of different faiths, skin colours and ethnic and cultural backgrounds, who were migrating for the first time to an unfamiliar country. Among them were Muslims of both Indian and Mozambican origin who have, since colonial times, been portrayed as the Muslim, racialized and ethnic Other, and whose senses of belonging have not been voiced, heard nor properly understood. As such research is required, within the framework of the Lusophone postcolonial critique. This thesis aims to contribute to this critical approach by providing a ethnography of the postcolonial material, affective, sensory and bodily ways through which these postcolonial subjects, and their descendants already born in Postcolonial Portugal, have been reproducing and negotiating collective memories of belonging. It departs from the assumption that one cannot understand people’s belonging without going beyond the simplistic identity categories often used to label them. Therefore it adopts a phenomenology of material culture and experience in order to understand how these subjects have been re-appropriating and reconstructing general ideas of Indian-ness, Muslim-ness, Mozambican-ness and Portuguese-ness across generations, particularly when engaging with a multiplicity of objects that integrate into their everyday life, namely objects of home décor, food and media. This thesis results from fieldwork conducted over a period of 12 months in these subjects’ current public and private contexts of conviviality, such as the Lisbon Central Mosque and their family homes. Biographical interviews and visual methods were also applied to two generations (parent and child) from the 11 family-household units collaborating in this research.

Papers. Revista de Sociologia, 2007

The text analyzes the contradictions, ambiguities and accommodations underlying the remodelling of Portugal from an imperial metropolis into a European post-colonial nation. It focuses on two interrelated and contradictory facets of national redefinition-namely, the incorporation of Portuguese transnational migrants into the nation and Portugal's transformation into a receptor of immigrants from its former colonies.

Social Identities 18 (1), pp. 39-63, 2012

This article wishes to contribute to the study of the historical processes that have been spotting Muslim populations as favourite targets for political analysis and governance. Focusing on the Portuguese archives, civil as well as military, the article tries to uncover the most conspicuous identity representations (mainly negative or ambivalent) that members of Portuguese colonial apparatus built around Muslim communities living in African colonies, particularly in Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. The paper shows how these culturally and politically constructed images were related to the more general strategies by which Portuguese imagined their own national identity, both as ‘European’ and as ‘coloniser’ or ‘imperial people’. The basic assumption of this article is that policies enforced in a context of inter-ethnic and religious competition are better understood when linked to the identity strategies inherent to them. These are conceived as strategic constructions aimed at the preservation, the protection and the imaginary expansion of the subject, who looks for groups to be included in and out-groups to reject, exclude, aggress or eliminate. We think that most of the inter-ethnic relationships and conflicts, as well as the very experience of ethnicity, are born from this identity matrix.

The Arabic-Islamic studies in Portugal reveal some particularities within the European context. The comparison with Spain shows the structural differences that, from its origin in the 18th century, reveal a discontinuity investment in the Arabic language, which never evolved into an independent philological framework. Moreover, the history of Muslims, as an integral part of the Portuguese past only begins to re-inscribe in the discourse of social and human sciences after the 1974 Revolution, in a paradigm shift not yet fully achieved.

H-Luso-Africa, H-Net Reviews, 2021

Commissioned by Philip J. Havik (Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical (IHMT)) Since the last decades of the twentieth century, studies on diasporas, migration, and identities on the move have steadily grown in the humanities, focusing on modern globalization and technological enhancements in communication and transports. In African studies, many researchers have discussed identity ruptures, continuities, and cultural reconstructions in transoceanic settings. In the disciplinary field of history, debates on this subject have facilitated a better understanding of the historicity of culture, showing how historical, geographical, and social circumstances need to be addressed on a case-by-case basis. Such an approach unearths how African cultures retain their core elements within the diasporas and how circumstantial needs have contributed to reinventions in personal and collective ways of life. Perspectives on the exclusivity of cultural continuities or ruptures have created a platform for comprehending the extent to which diasporic cultures are contradictory.[1] The historicity of cultures of peoples in contact zones is a theme that has also garnered anthropologists' attention. Regarding migration and

A Historical Companion tp0 Postcolponial Literatures: Continental Europe and its Empires (eds. Poddar et al), 2008

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].