Colonial Ambivalence in Contemporary Moving Images: The Portuguese Case

Abstract

This article is an exploratory attempt to address the colonial ambivalence implicit in contemporary moving images in the Portuguese context. The postcolonial turn that emerged in the last decades in Portugal attests to an earnest attempt to problematise the nation’s postcolonial condition, which in turn derives from a long-overdue admission that our contemporary societies were built from colonial plunder. Drawing heavily on the critique of Lusophony, I argue that this postcolonial turn is also a consequence of the need to inscribe the Portuguese national narrative within an increasingly global world arising from the subordination of culture to the “laws of the market”. In addition, I argue that this post-colonial approach found in Portuguese contemporary visual culture is ambivalent since it tends to ignore the problem of the legitimacy and the speaking position of the artist and/or intellectual. The legitimacy problem — of who speaks of and about others — is often paradoxically disregarded in contemporary audiovisual productions that address the Portuguese colonial past and its postcolonial condition. In the same way, the intrinsic relationship between visual production and knowledge is ignored, and consequently, between visual production and power. In this way, I argue that colonial ambivalence continues to pervade cultural discourses and contemporary artistic practices today, even when such practices and discourses appear to articulate a postcolonial critique.