The Presence of the Past: Imagination and Affect in The Museu do Oriente, Portugal

• Autor(a) principal: Peralta, Elsa
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/30240
• topic: Affect; Art and aesthetics; Museum objects; Portuguese empire; Portuguese nationalism; Postcolonialism

Portugal was the first and the most enduring of all European colonial empires, beginning in the fifteenth century with the establishment of a commercial domain in the East and lasting until 1974, when the fall of the dictatorship in Portugal paved the way for decolonization in the African colonies. Despite the formal end of the empire, a national imperialistic representation of the history of the country persists, immune to postcolonial critique and widely disseminated through school curricula, public discourses, and propaganda. The period known as the “Eastern Empire” came to capture the Portuguese collective imagination as the golden age of Portuguese history, embodying a self-representation of Portugal – which remains until today – as a country of “Discoveries” rather than as a colonizing center. This chapter argues that the resilience of the established view of Portugal's imperial past is strongly dependent on a preferred mode of representation which is materially and visually based. It looks at the Museu do Oriente (Museum of the Orient) in Lisbon in an attempt to understand how the Portuguese national past is imagined and affected in the museum space through the presence of objects.