Portuguese in the cane: the racialization of labour in Hawaiian plantations

The identification of the Portuguese as intrepid sailors crossing oceans and bridging the world, as praised in Camões’ epic poem Os Lusiadas (The Lusiads), has been central to a historical narrative that merges sea travel, trade, conquest, knowledge, empire and nation. Yet sailing, I shall argue in this article, was also about a variety of endeavours other than opening the way to empire. Sailing could also be embarking as a stowaway, travelling immense distances on improbable fishing boats, joining the crews of passing whalers, being kidnapped ashore, enslaved, enduring the galleys or being sent off to faraway plantations as labour. More often than not, sailing overseas was a way to escape poverty, abuse, oppression, misery and distress. And that – sailing away from their homes, looking for a better life, running from destitution – was what many Portuguese men and women did over extended periods of time. Their routes hardly corresponded to an imperial strategy for Portugal. They often contradicted it.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Plantation Memories, Labor Identities, and the Celebration of Heritage The Case of Hawaii’s Plantation Village

In this article, I discuss the role of plantation museums in confronting, legitimizing, and filtering the racialized violence on which the plantation economy stood. I start with a brief review of the literature on plantation societies, discuss the plantation–race nexus, and highlight the renewed interest in plantations raised by contemporary approaches to the environment, the Anthropocene, cropscapes, and nonhuman agencies. Next, I compare different modes of instrumentalizing and displaying the memory of the plantation, some of which are critical of its violence, and some of which are oblivious to it. Some are focused on technical aspects of sugar production, while others are focused on its labor force. Finally, I present in detail Hawai‘i's Plantation Village in Waipahu, O‘ahu. This community-based museum is designed in accordance with the prevailing narrative of a multiethnic Hawai‘i. While it provides visitors with an overview of the plantation experience in general, not excluding the discipline and violence endured by laborers, its main focus is on the specific cultural heritage of each one of the nationalities that arrived in Hawai‘i to work in sugar. I argue that the museum project is consistent with an idealized view of Hawai‘i's society as a multiethnic racial paradise. This image emerged in the 1920s and helped expunge from collective perception the racialized hierarchies that structured the labor force while also erasing from the picture the structural tension between natives and settlers regarding the appropriation of land and subsequent rights, entitlements, and impediments. I further argue that the presentation of a collective heritage composed of multiple distinct identities originating in the plantation era provides a tool that counterweights the unresolved and unsettled tensions of the contemporary post-plantation world.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Never-Ending Poxes of Syphilis, AIDS, and Measles

In this article, I address some infectious diseases that never really “ended,” even though their morbidity, their social impact, and their public visibility have faded away: AIDS, syphilis, and measles. I will use data from different projects I have conducted on each of those epidemics: HIV/AIDS at the doctoral training level in the 1990s, with a geographical focus on Brazil and the United States; syphilis in the context of a 2010 project on the social history of health in Lisbon in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and measles as part of my current project on labor migration in the 19th century, with a focus on epidemic outbreaks in migrant ships from Madeira to Hawaii.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Samuël Coghe, Population Politics in the Tropics: Demography, Health and Transimperialism in Colonial Angola

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Intersections of Empire, Post-Empire, and Diaspora: De-Imperializing Lusophone Studies

The present article opens with a generic plea for the de-imperialization of Lusophone studies. A de-imperial turn should allow researchers to explore more thoroughly the experiences of diaspora and exile that an empire-centered history and its spin-offs have obfuscated; it should also help to de-essentialize depictions of Portuguese heritage and culture shaped by these narratives. Such a turn promises to address the multiple identifications, internal diversities, and racialized inequalities produced by the making and unmaking of empire. My contribution consists of a few ethnographic-historic case studies collected at the intersections of empire, post-empire, and diaspora. These include nineteenthcentury diasporic movements that brought Portuguese subjects to competing empires; past and present celebrations of heritage in diasporic contexts; culture wars around representations; and current directions in post-imperial celebrations and reparations.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Plant-people Intimacies: Sugar Canes, Pineapples and the Memory of Migration in Hawai‘i

In this article, I use the concept of ‘plant-people intimacies’ for the social-mediated web of cognitions, rituals, affects and embodied memories that connect some human groups and some plant species. I test the concept in the transformed landscapes of plantation Hawai‘i, where sugar canes, pineapples and other crops replaced the traditional taro gardens and displaced their human gardeners while producing a multi-ethnic population with migrant workers-settlers. I will analyse how evocations of special bonds to some crops among diasporic persons express a vegetal nexus with ancestral geographies and act as a code to negotiate social and historical positionalitiesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Apocalipse zombie, sem efeitos especiais

A propósito do SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19, que apresento como zoonose contemporânea, discuto neste ensaio as articulações entre epidemias e memória coletiva, produção de conhecimento, literatura, arte, experiência vivida, medo, preparação e prevenção de calamidades, representações do futuro, biopolítica, necropolítica, e saúde pública.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

World Anthropologies and Global Health

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