Portuguese Colonial Empire and Urban Popular Culture: Comparing Visions from the Metropolis and the Colonies (1945-1974)

Empires are spaces of circulation of people and goods between colonies and their metropolitan centres, but they are also spaces of global circulation. A variety of cultural forms were circulated within the space of the Portuguese empire as well as between empires and non-imperial spaces, thus affecting representations of the world and everyday practices. This interdisciplinary project engages history, anthropology, postcolonial studies and cultural studies in an attempt to understand how the circulation of urban imperial and global popular cultural products between 1945 and 1974 helped to build a colonial society composed through the intermingling of colonies, metropolis and wider global contexts. The project is innovative in its interdisciplinary nature. The team members have already worked extensively on the themes of empire and popular culture based on a range of academic traditions. This approach will enable the topic to be studied more systematically by combining cultural production with its practice and consumption, along the lines of studies carried out in other contexts but largely missing in Portuguese scholarship.