Returns and departures: the exotopic imagination of post-colonial Portugal

Abstract

Verbs of movement reflect our identity’s common denominator, such as to leave, to exit, to emigrate, to seek, to go in search. So much has been said of our situatedly Portuguese modernity that, in order to be great, we must wander outside our own dreams. We returned from our colonial and colonising saga with our mind and imagination already filled with imaginary baggage, of other centres, other ‘discoveries’ to be narrated. The Portuguese postcoloniality, although very anchored in the rhetoric of imperial nostalgia, restores, in a watchful gaze, these new movements and identity ‘pilgrimages’. This paper seeks to develop a critical reading of the novel by Dulce Maria Cardoso, O Retorno (The Return), to critically reflect on the prefix ‘post’ in our recently conquered postcoloniality. It also seeks to incorporate a reflection on Portugal’s place in the historic encounter with modernity and the centrality that resulted from ‘docking’ with Europe, denouncing the ambivalence and the exotopy with which the country represents and defines itself. At stake are the identity meanings produced in a context of sudden political and cultural transitions, which reveal a historical ballast comprising imperial imaginations and the lessening of the country within Europe and on the road of modernity. Between the return of imaginary empires and the illusions of new routes to old centres, the country renews its eternal cycle of returns and departures, symbolically digesting its losses in a process of identity autophagy.