Why organise a special section on decolonising Europe?

Patrícia Ferraz de Matos and Livio Sansone

In recent years, problems linked to racism and the colonial past have appeared more markedly in the public sphere. There is almost always an episode that triggers this appearance more effectively. In 2020 it was the murder of the African American George Floyd in Minneapolis. In the United States of America, excessive violence against Black people, namely by police forces, once again resulted in death and gave rise to much protest. In addition to the shocking images that were shown on television around the world, newspapers and magazines also reported on what had happened. The need to discuss episodes such as the death of Floyd at the hands of a police officer became urgent, first in non-academic circles and then in academic circles in many countries other than the USA. Connecting this violence to the colonial past (and its exploitative practices) and to the racism that underpinned it was easy. Likewise, the association of Floyd’s murder with the Black Lives Matter movement (which emerged in 2013) triggered the manifestation of dissatisfaction in various sectors of society, especially among racialised or marginalised people. This dissatisfaction was manifested by some social actors in several acts of revolt, also considered violent, although more against things than people (especially because they came to question the established powers). The acts of revolt included: questioning the celebration, through representations, of some figures in the public space (inside and outside buildings), but above all in the street; the graffitiing of some monuments and/or statues; and, in other cases, the toppling of statues. At issue was the connection that some of the figures represented pictorially or in the statues had to colonialism, slavery, the slave trade, and/or the exploitation of people. This settling of accounts with the past, motivated by groups of people who have felt discriminated against for several generations (and also by people who show solidarity with their causes) has spread to Europe and the rest of the world. The prominent place given to figures who led expeditions to other countries (since these also led to the exploitation of people, their murder or discrimination), or who supported the development of research in other countries, or who contributed to the founding of some universities, since the money/funds used for these initiatives came from exploitation – colonial or associated with slavery – was questioned.

Following this logic, several statues were torn down in the USA, such as that of Christopher Columbus in Minnesota, that of General Robert Lee, commander of the Confederates, in Virginia, but also of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, considered the “founding fathers” of the fatherland, in Portland. In the European context, the statue of the British slave trader Edward Colston was torn down in Bristol and some monuments to Leopold II, whose regime contributed to the deaths of millions in Africa, were damaged or removed in Belgium. In Portugal, a debate was raised (especially by those linked to the political spectrum of the left) about the removal of the Padrão dos Descobrimentos from the Belém area – that most visited by tourists. The aforementioned monument, erected in temporary material for the Portuguese World Exhibition in 1940 in Lisbon – the most expensive event that took place during the Estado Novo dictatorship (Matos 2013) – had the objective of celebrating the epic narrative of travel and conquest (through various human figures) of the Portuguese around the world, and also became a symbol of that period in which the Portuguese dictatorship maintained territories under colonial administration at all costs. Although demolished in 1943, this monument was later rebuilt in stone and inaugurated in 1960, at a time when the anti-colonial movements were advancing on the ground. The discomfort that this and other constructions cause today has grown substantially, but, at least in Portugal, the debate seems to be just beginning. There, some authors are also starting to argue that the idea of decolonising should extend beyond the places of the so-called Portuguese colonial empire to other territories that had Portuguese influence (Bastos 2020). Our view is that it is important that each country looks critically at its own colonial experience, but also at the experiences of other countries. In this sense, it is useful to think about international comparative research projects, comparing different colonial traditions (English/British, French, Portuguese, Belgian, etc.), as well as migration or diasporic experiences that cross several different colonial regimes.

The emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 brought about isolation, encouraged or decreed by various governments. Yet even this was not enough to prevent people from various political and social quarters from taking to the streets to shout for the need for anti-racist policies. This was yet another reason for us to debate the idea of decolonising Europe in a special forum section of the journal (Matos and Sansone 2021). The discussion of these issues, often dormant until a Black person (especially if he/she is young) is cruelly murdered in the public space, can be extended to the media, such as radio and new social media. These are often closer to people, as Axel Mudahemuka Gossiaux argues. The discussion can be extended to museums and exhibitions, as in the zoo analysed by Samantha Sithole, Marianna Fernandes, Olivier Hymas, Kavita Sharma and Gretchen Walters, which, despite being the result of recent construction, continues to reproduce the prejudices of the past. And it can be seen in forms of internal colonisation, as Luca Lai and Sharon Watson analyse in the case of Sardinia, or the manifestations of white nationalism through propaganda exposed by Jordan Kiper. An important part of the change may involve education and the modification of schoolbook curricula, as Elisabetta Campagni also points out in this issue. We believe that all these examples, although few in number with focus on only a few contexts (Belgium, Switzerland, Sardinia, Serbia and Italy), help to characterise this phenomenon in Europe, contribute to its clarification today and can lead to a more extensive reflection on the subject. But more than the meaning that these discussions can have in the present, it is important that they have an impact on the future and on people’s lives in terms of their personal/professional fulfilment and of generalised access to resources and goods. In our cities, the fight against extreme and lasting inequalities will then also be a fight over places of memory.

References

Bastos, Cristiana (2020), ‘Intersections of Empire, Post-Empire, and Diaspora: De-Imperializing Lusophone Studies’, Journal of Lusophone Studies 5, no. 2: 27–54.

Matos, Patrícia Ferraz de (2013), The Colours of the Empire: Racialized Representations during Portuguese Colonialism (Oxford: Berghahn Books).

Matos, Patrícia Ferraz de, and Livio Sansone (2021), ‘FORUM: Decolonising Europe: National and Transnational Projects’, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 30, no. 2: 79–140.

Livio Sansone received his PhD from the University of Amsterdam (1992). Sansone is full professor of anthropology at the Federal University of Bahia. He is the head of the Factory of Ideas Programme – an advanced international course in ethnic and African studies – and coordinates the Digital Museum of African and Afro-Brazilian Heritage. He has published extensively on youth culture, ethnicity, inequalities, international transit of ideas of race and antiracism, anthropology and colonialism, globalization and heritage, with research based in the UK, Holland, Suriname, Brazil, Italy and, recently, Cape Verde, Senegal, Mozambique, and Guinea Bissau. His best known book in English is Blackness Without Ethnicity: Creating Race in Brazil (New York: Palgrave, 2003).

Patrícia Ferraz de Matos is an anthropologist, research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon (UL), and member of the teaching staff of the PhD in Anthropology of UL since 2013. She is associate editor of AJEC (2020–), convener of the Europeanist Network of the EASA (2020–), deputy director of the journal Análise Social (2021–) and correspondent member, in Portugal, of EASA’s History of Anthropology Network (2019–). Her main research interests are: the anthropology of colonialism and imperialism, history of anthropology, scientific societies, racism and other forms of social discrimination, photography, eugenics, and nationalism.