Reconfiguring Identities in the Portuguese speaking World Easterly Wind

This book explores the impact of cinematographic representations of the former Portuguese territories in the Orient, promoted by the Estado Novo dictatorship (193374), on socio-cultural memories and narrative identities, through a critical exhumation of the archives and analysis of the existing filmography. The filmography representing the ‘Portuguese Orient’ during the Estado Novo (1933–1974) is scarce and late, employing a simplified Luso- tropicalist rhetoric that repeatedly actualises the myth of a vast, long-lost, territory. This book examines the impact of cinematographic representations of the former Portuguese territories in the Orient on socio-cultural memories and narrative identities, through a critical exhumation of the archives and analysis of existing filmography. The analysis reveals that films of the ‘Portuguese Orient’ depict this imagined community with a certain degree of vagueness. This is largely a consequence of the prolonged disintegration of the metropolis’ relationship with this imagined community, a relationship that was mainly based on projections (about their alleged Portuguese identity) and ruins.