The Colonial Hotel: spacing violence at the Grande Hotel, Beira, Mozambique

In spite of its dereliction, the Grande Hotel in Beira, Mozambique, has emerged as an iconic African building. The dissonant meanings of this site, offer multiple opportunities to investigate the intersection of space and colonialism. We focus upon the cultural and political topologies of the hotel, and of colonial hotels generally, and make the proposition that they were a particular kind of violent colonial institution. By converging a relational reading of both violence and architecture, we reconstruct through the excavation of archival and related materials, the processes present in the histories of the hotel and city at large, to unmask how they acted as spaces of slow violence. White settler’s activities and rationales were underpinned by deliberative strategies of unknowing, forgetting, disavowal which together formed a kind of cultural agnosia that insulated them from the foundational violence that supported the colonial condition. We use a dispersed concept of violence, understood as a tactical and mutable process, which moves between physical, symbolic, embodied and performative domains. We address these domains in the paper through an analysis of the ways the city of Beira was planned, its architecture shaped and represented, and in the recreational and social performances within the hotel.Fieldwork in Mozambique was possible due to the funding from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (SFRH/BSAB/1430/2014) and the support from the Centre for Geographical Studies, University of Lisbon.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Anarchism and anticolonialism in Portugal (1919-1926): Mário Domingues, A Batalha and black internationalism

This article evaluates the nature and resonance of the writings of the Príncipe-born journalist Mário Domingues. Domingues published numerous articles in the Portuguese anarcho-syndicalist daily newspaper A Batalha between 1919 and 1923 on colonialism as part of a programme of anticolonial and anti-capitalist struggle that was the earliest and most substantial campaign of the time. The contents of his work are analysed and the connections that he and A Batalha forged with black African organizations in Lisbon are assessed. It is argued that Domingues’ work represents an alternative to both nation-centred and Marxist-oriented programmes of anticolonialism and its study aids in the reconstruction of the contours of a radical and active “Black Lisbon” of the late 1910s and early 1920s in Portugal and sheds new light on the associational culture of black political struggles during the period