HUM 4609: political Philosophy in Lisbon: Reaction and Revolution
4 advanced elective credits
This course will provide an introduction to anti-colonial philosophy and political theory as a response to the colonial philosophies of the Portuguese empire. Lisbon is an ideal place to study the origins of colonial philosophy, the history and strategies of resistance to colonialism and slavery, as well as the contemporary persistence of colonialism and its attendant forms of racism, nationalism, and sexism and movements against them. Lisbon would be the center of ocean navigation leading to the colonization of the Americas. Colonial ships setting sail to and from Lisbon with routes to Africa and Asia would make Portugal the longest lasting European colonial empire. In the 20th century, anti-colonial revolutions in Portugal’s colonies would not only directly lead to the end of this empire—they were also uniquely anti-fascist revolutions that helped to re-found Portugal as a democratic republic. The legacy of colonial struggle continues into the present day: the city maintains a “heroic” public tourism identity as the place that created the conditions for the so-called “Discoveries,” as it simultaneously underplays its twin invention, the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The course will work to undermine pernicious colonial myths that still maintain a presence in contemporary imagination, for example: people didn’t resist colonization and/or the slave trade, colonized people liked colonization, Portuguese colonialism was the “nicest civilizing kind” (i.e. the ideology of “Lusotropicalism”), and we will explore how tourism and gentrification act as neocolonial forces in Lisbon.
This course offers students the opportunity to study political philosophy in a way that is immediately relevant to many contemporary questions and struggles to end racism, sexism, colonial exploitation, and authoritarianism. We will look at the context of the advent of colonialism and the slave trade in Portugal with texts and films like Enrique Dussel’s Invention of the Americas and Raoul Peck’s Exterminate all the Brutes docu-series. Site locations to accompany this will include among others the “Monument to the Discoveries,” Jerónimos Monastery, 1506 Lisbon Massacre Jewish Memorial, Martim Moniz Square, and the Museu Nacional de Etnologia. We will then transition to looking at the anti-colonial movements that would finally dissolve the Portuguese empire in the 20th century with primary and secondary texts about important leaders and theorists like Amílcar Cabral from Guinea Bissau, Eduard Mondlane of Mozambique, and Mário Pinto de Andrade from Angola. We will study the city of Lisbon from the perspective of anti-colonial activists and thinkers who found themselves there to study and eventually becoming the next generation of leaders in their respective countries. We will also look at the multi-layered history of Lisbon as a place with history of slavery and colonial conquest, fascist dictatorship, democratic anti-fascist revolution, and now gentrification and displacement. By pairing readings of primary colonial and anti-colonial texts with visits to local museums and public monuments, students will be better equipped to understand the context how things we might today think “unthinkable” or “obviously bad” were held up as positive goals and aspirations. We will finish the course studying the Carnation Revolution with a visit to the Aljube museum—a former prison for political prisoners now turned into a museum about the Salazar dictatorship and the resistance movements that ended it.
Prerequisites: (FME 1000 and FME 1001) OR (EPS 1000 and MOB 1010) AND FCI 1000