Universidade do Minho/Universidade de Aveiro. Programa Doutoral em Estudos Culturais
Abstract
Publicado em: "Colonialisms, post-colonialisms and lusophonies: proceedings of the 4th International Congress in Cultural Studies". ISBN 978-989-98219-2-7Departing from the observation that the blogosphere
is nowadays a powerful communication space between Lusophone
citizens - users of Portuguese language constitute the fifth largest
language community on the Internet (Macedo , Martins & Macedo
, 2010) - this paper presents some findings of a study that sought
to examine the contents of fifteen blogs, Brazilian Mozambican
and Portuguese, in relation to representations of the Lusophony.
The results show that many aspects of the Portuguese colonial
empire long history, from its achievements to its vicissitudes,
are reminded, communicated and discussed in order to justify
points of view, whether favorable or unfavorable, about the
meaning of a Lusophone community. Regarding it as a kind
of imperial extension, both its advocates (usually nostalgic
Portuguese on their supposedly glorious historical past), as its
detractors (mostly Africans and Brazilians who preserve the
memory of a past of domination), tend to produce simplified
representations that result in tensions and misunderstandings.
Consequently, there is confusion between the nowadays geocultural
community of Lusophony and its own past. This
confusion is connected with the crossing of the independent
present of those who speak, think and feel in Portuguese with
the colonial past, which led them to the meeting of their cultures.
In fact, on the blogosphere, lusophony is emphasized, on one
hand, as a Portuguese colonial empire heritage and, one the
other hand, as an unequivocal proof of its radical disappearance.
It is concluded that such a diversity of representations can turn
this “imagined community” into a “imaginative community.”