A shit show
Bruno Zhu
Image courtesy of Bruno Zhu
The following is an extended version of a text written in response to a racist incident that happened between a fellow Portuguese artist and myself. This became an issue because he is a member of the space I would be presenting an exhibition at, and was my point of contact there. I spoke to the other members and no active solution was put forth from their side. I decided to write a statement addressing this issue, which would be released as my exhibition text. At the time they were supportive of this idea. This May, after I submitted a shortened version of the text, they set up an impromptu meeting at the space, where they coerced me into editing the text to remove any direct mention of the space, the person in question, or his associates. In writing this text, I wanted to understand a very specific type of individual in our industry, in the hope of unpicking this dense fabric that is race, which wraps around our social relations and our identities.—Bruno Zhu
When I was in high school, I was asked to model for a photography project about cardinal sins. During its presentation the student explained that their portrait of me represented gluttony and, when asked by his teachers why I was chosen, he said it was because I looked ugly. Three years ago, I was commissioned to make a public art piece for a prominent shopping mall in Lisbon. After the project was pitched to her, the head of marketing was confused. Even though she was briefed beforehand by the contemporary art museum that the mall was partnering up with, she was annoyed that my work—and, indeed, I—did not look Portuguese enough. She said that the shopping mall attracted high-end clientele and unfortunately my profile did not fit their vision. Last summer at a dinner, some artist friends and I were talking about success in the world of contemporary art. As the conversation shifted to the people at the table, one person—an active member of the artist-run space where my show would soon be taking place—turned to me and said that I was successful because I was a “chinoca” [chink] and identity politics are trendy right now.
During all of these instances I fell silent, digesting their impact on me. I pulled apart the words, tones, and contexts, because surely none of them meant what they said in a bad way? Maybe by “ugly" the student meant the mood of the photograph. “Not Portuguese enough” could’ve meant wanting a more established artist. Maybe the word “chinoca” was used as a cheeky way to signal a new level of camaraderie? If these phrases were not meant in an offensive way, then why was I being called ugly? Why was I described as less than? Why was I blamed for being too much of one thing? The most terrifying realization I have had is that none of these people intended to offend me. In their eyes it was just a matter of fact that I, as a first-generation Portuguese person and child of Chinese immigrants, didn't fit their standards of beauty, nationality, or personhood. That I was a monster, an alien, an industry fetish.
Given that my exhibition was being hosted by the person who used a racist slur to describe me and my practice, I couldn't continue forward without taking action. I thought about canceling the show, but this would only penalize me, and getting him fired wouldn’t prevent him from casually using racist slurs. So I set out to look into the state of racial politics in Portugal today. I wanted to understand how a self-described antiracist and anti-fascist, who attended the local BLM march and ticks all the boxes of millennial leftism, gets to use a racial slur so effortlessly in private. If this term was not meant to be offensive, why is he the one who gets to evacuate the meaning from the word? Why does he have the power to displace history? Why does he have the privilege to assign identity?
I was troubled to see how several colonialisms were conflated into one in this moment, not to mention the sparsity of conversations about the aftermath of decolonization(s) and its ramifications in contemporary society. The latter is an ongoing embodied experience for the Portuguese, as the generations who lived through the authoritarian period of Estado Novo (1933-74) are still alive today. They moved from the metropole1 to the colonies seeking riches and watched Portugal tweak its constitution to become an empire. They watched their children being sent to war while African nationalist movements fought for freedom and these children returned, bitter and stripped of their settler status, when the regime fell in 1974.2 Trying to understand how someone aligned with leftist thinking called me "chinoca" made me wonder if there was a racist tradition in the Portuguese Left. There doesn't seem to be an explicitly racist tradition, but it was telling to see how the Communist Party [Partido Comunista Português], Portugal’s largest opposition party, was never staunchly anti-colonialist until it saw this position as an opportunity to overthrow the regime.3 The 1969 student protests in Coimbra that sparked the beginning of the end of the empire were largely comprised of upper middle class students mirroring the May ’68 protests and counterculture movements abroad. It’s important to underline that these dissenting movements were ideologically heterogeneous and came from across the spectrum of Marxist thinking. Only Maoist groups consistently advocated for anti-colonialist apparatus.4
While the end of the authoritarian regime was critical to the livelihood of many people, the Portuguese left-leaning vanguard was also heavily invested in internationalism. After an attempt to construct a socialist state, now known as the turbulent summer of 1975, Portugal reinstated democracy with the founding of the Socialist Party [Partido Socialista] (the main center-left party today) and joined the European free market without looking back. Without looking back to Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé e Príncipe, or Cape Verde, all decolonized at lightning speed and left to grapple with a five centuries-old record of dispossession and exploitation. Without looking back to East Timor, left to its own devices as Indonesia annexed the territory in 1975. This Socialist Party was founded with financial aid from the CIA, as the US feared Portugal would turn into a communist state.5
Why am I going on about anti-colonialism? Because I am not interested in an affect-based framework for racism. Hate and fear are real, but porous. They leave too many exits for accountability to escape from. In my experience, racist behaviour is usually understood as an isolated event devoid of history. It’s closer to an act of passion—impulsive and quickly diffused once apologies are offered. I must accept these apologies otherwise I’m being ungrateful. Apologies are gifted, and gifts are deemed a good thing. What more could I want, they ask.
Installation view: Bruno Zhu, Uh-oh, Sismógrafo, Porto (May 22–June 19, 2021). Photo: Filipe Braga
Image courtesy of Bruno Zhu
In recent years, discussions around racism have reintroduced a historical aspect through the reassessment of Western imperialisms, but I fear that this critical knowledge does not produce causal relations but rather claims to ‘expose’ history. Among my ‘woke’ friends, coming to terms with the colonial past of one’s nation has become a moral, cathartic, and individualistic experience: colonialism=slavery=bad, accountability=knowledge=good. I was bad, now I am good. To feel bad about a bygone era protects their ego from acknowledging their role in reproducing notions of liberty, freedom of expression, and progress that only benefit a particular kind of geopolitics. In my case, the artist I had dinner with is someone who I identify as a “legacy liberal.” He is someone born and raised with liberal ideals—his dad was an active participant in overthrowing the regime and therefore he accrues the revolutionary capital earned by his ancestors. He once had a Frantz Fanon book sitting on his studio desk. He dabbles in the critique of capitalism like one must the “age of anthropocene.” He has become attuned to the irony of whiteness via TikTok. Yet he’s afforded a luxurious distance from being a subject of critique precisely because society entrusts people like him with the role of the critic, the voice of reason. Perhaps my ambivalence toward using descriptors like privileged, white, male, cis, straight, or Western hinders my message, because I refuse to engage in the same reductionist rhetoric as he does. But I hope that you, the reader, will nevertheless understand my point.
Even though no explicit racist agenda can be found in the annals of the traditional Portuguese Left, we still encounter resistance in recognizing all modalities of oppression. Instead, there is a focus on privileging the humanity of some over others and using verbose nationalist apologia that is at best dismissive and at worst a fugitive of its own colonial legacy. I am willing to accept that calling me "chinoca" doesn’t necessarily make him a racist, but the ease with which he uses such a term is a testament to a certain bourgeois6 upper middle class mentality that remains unscathed today.
If Portuguese history is evidence of a kind of national cosmetic surgery that replaced its colonial past with European modernity, the Portuguese psyche seems to have skipped the nip and tuck. During Estado Novo, the regime widely promoted Lusotropicalism. This polarizing framework, a product of its time, was developed by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in the 1930s as an attempt to reify the racial hybridity of Brazilian identity. In order to do so, Freyre drew aspects from geography and anthropology that positively justified Portuguese colonialism. He argued that Portugal was a rightful colonizer as the Portuguese were themselves made up of a mixture of many civilizations that had come before—Romans, Celts, Moors—making them familiar with the plight of the colonized and thus kinder settlers; that Portugal, being closest to the equatorial line compared to other European nations, made the people’s blood warmer and thus more adaptable to the tropical climate; that such physiological attributes, along with the Portuguese colonial empire being the oldest territorial presence overseas, justified Portuguese’s penchant for miscegenation.7
Thus to be Portuguese was to be worldly, a body of many races, a seer of cultures and continents old and new. As this ethnopluralist stance created dehumanizing policies overseas, metropolitan Portugal developed a case of hyperidentity. According to the late philosopher Eduardo Lourenço, Portugal has a disturbing fixation for its colonial history as a story that elevates us, the Portuguese, above all other nations. For Lourenço, this hyperidentity allows Portugal to always have an identity regardless of context, one that is less about the collective capacity of the nation and more about being the “chosen historical actor of the European adventure in the world.”8
The scale and influence of colonial Portugal through the ages, crystallized by its abrupt end, became a foundational myth for its national identity, even after the fall of Estado Novo.9 Considering that Lusotropicalism attempted to remove the question of race from Portuguese coloniality, the available critical debate that remains utilizes non-white people as either historical data (for example, the transatlantic slave trade as a rational mercantile endeavor) or strictly as a color chart for the human skin. Within this model, seeing color does not equate to seeing race. The pejorative term “preto” is widely used today by non-Black people to describe Afro-Portuguese or Black people, so it is unsurprising that I was referred to as “chinoca.” I certainly look like one, don’t I? Many Portuguese people frown upon the use of the word race, as for them there is only one—the human kind—and so the term ethnicity is preferred. We could consider this usage to be refreshingly contemporary, as it is commonly agreed that race is a social construct,10 but when this point is raised amongst the mainstream Portuguese population, most will dismiss the phrase “social construct” as phoney, intellectual speak. Here, we witness another game of semantics where discrimination against ethnic groups follows pre-WWII scientific racism. The racialist assignment of identity is bolstered by a resolute sense of post-racial entitlement that leaves no space for the Other to reclaim their subjectivity.
Door for Sismógrafo, 2021. Fabric, hardware. Installation view, Uh-oh, Sismógrafo, Porto. Photo: Filipe Braga
Returning to that evening, I have considered how my professional accomplishments were entangled with my ethnic background, with the latter coming to represent my desirability in the context of the art-market. Suddenly, this racist equation is refashioned, returning to the inevitable demon that made him do it: Capitalism! Capitalism made him think it! Capitalism made him believe it! Capitalism made him say it, so surely he must be excused, even praised for his wit?! Could we argue that a racist slur is justified because it was used while criticizing a larger evil? Are there instances in which I should tolerate being reduced to a racist trope? Are there legitimate moments to employ racist thinking that I need to know about?
I want to think you would answer these questions with a resounding No, yet I can’t help but remain skeptical about how one engages or rather becomes an ally with the antiracist cause. In a conversation with a local artist during the protests in solidarity with Bruno Candé, a Black Portuguese actor who was murdered in broad daylight in Moscavide by a colonial war veteran last summer, I expressed frustration toward the current state of the discussions around race and gender in Portugal. I was criticizing the lack of originality in the language surrounding it: how, instead of creating a new lexicon to translate and situate these issues in the national context, there was a heavy reliance on anglicisms. When I suggested that inventing new vocabulary would probably be the most patriotic thing our generation could do to pave the way for social progress, this artist became scared. She said that “patriotic” was an ugly word, that it was dated and something she associated with her grandparents. She seemed to conflate patriotic with nationalistic. I brought up the same issue with another Portuguese artist and while they agreed with me, they added that institutions should be “held accountable,” without stating what it is they should be held accountable for. They weren’t able to say this in Portuguese. They noticed this inconsistency and it became awkward between us.
From the 1990s onward, my generation witnessed an exodus by Portuguese intellectuals to Central European cultural epicenters like London, Paris, and Berlin. If post-fascist Portuguese contemporaneity was premised on a jump into Europe, I believe the byproduct is a fatalistic, deeply cynical outlook toward local conditions of social reproduction. In no way do I support any form of isolationism, but I can’t unsee how people make use of their social mobility and the shapes and voids it traces. I find these blindspots alarming. They attest to the cultural displacement of a nation unwilling to diagnose its own identity, while pathologizing the identities of others.11
Bruno Zhu, poster made on the occasion of Uh-oh at Sismógrafo, Porto
Bruno Zhu, You know what you are, 2010-21. Clothing, fabric, fake eyelashes, hardware. Installation view, Uh-oh, Sismógrafo, Porto. Photo: Filipe Braga
What does national identity have to do with isolated racist events? By stripping the political category of race from its history, Portuguese society has undisputedly enshrined racialization in the production of its national subjects. Thus it becomes natural to clutch our wallets when we see a Roma person, persuade Afro-Portuguese students to not pursue higher education, beat a Ukrainian migrant to death at the airport, hyper-sexualize the Brazilian body, or accuse my parents and the Chinese community at large of tax evasion, human organ trafficking, and world domination via commie-COVID-19.
My aim in writing this text was to make sense of what happened during that dinner. I felt betrayed by my colleague, who had access to my work and personal life and humiliated me in order to show off his inner provocateur. We were not alone at the table, but much like the teachers at my high school and the marketing team at the shopping mall, my friends remained undisturbed. I can’t blame them for living in a stagnant social reality that prioritizes cosmetic change over an ideological one. Many of them posted black squares for #BlackOutTuesday on Instagram and used info-social posts to educate their followers. But none of them seem to have questioned the social contract that has inadvertently inscribed racism into its language. This is why racist slurs in Portuguese can easily slip away from their original meaning, so long as the speaker announces “I didn’t mean it that way.” Then in what way is a racist epithet meant to exist? Am I willing to be gaslit, to accept “chinoca” as a term of… endearment? How should I evade this racial profiling? By emulating K-Pop aesthetics instead? By proving I’m not a member of the Chinese Communist Party? By participating in the production of whiteness for whites so that they can feel visible in this era of everything-but-White? If I don’t, I’m bound to correct the racist projections laid onto me. I’ll have to submit to being “chinoca,” but not in that way. Do I want to produce “race”? What if the mechanism for such production was never in my hands to begin with?
In Lovebomb, Terre Thaemlitz lays out a fantastic observation about the immigrant experience and kinship:
In most cultures the immigrant’s arrival, like that of any lover or family member, represents both a threatening destruction of self and the promising creation of a new social body. To paraphrase Salman Rushdie, it is the immigrant’s seemingly impossible conquest of the forces of gravity (that is to say, “having flown") which sits at the heart of their simultaneous potential for resentment and admiration. The immigrant must juggle a slew of preconceptions and fetishizations—no matter how imbalanced they may be, and in addition to whatever personal baggage they are already carrying—so as to be welcomed into their new family.12
In the months leading up to the exhibition I wondered if I had overstayed my welcome in this particular family, with this host.
On a final note, the works in the exhibition in question had nothing to do with this incident. They were inspired by the blueprint of the exhibition space. The floor’s bathroom happens to be situated in the middle of the exhibition space, following the piping system from the floors above. I had noticed it during a site visit and it came to inspire the show. If powerful enough, flushing the toilet could hypothetically bring down the whole building. In this instance, flushing could be a powerful directional force with the toilet as a portal. One would go down. One would go under. So I pictured the space as waiting to go down under or, if you reverse this scheme, waiting to ascend from the underworld. Then what would come out of the toilet. Shit? A shitty person? Feelings of shittiness? Arriving somewhere shitty? I thought engaging with conceptual shit could be both funny and political. I wasn’t counting on being made to feel like shit in the process.
Bruno Zhu, You know what you are, 2010-21. Clothing, fabric, fake eyelashes, hardware. Installation view, Uh-oh, Sismógrafo, Porto. Photo: Filipe Braga
Image courtesy of Bruno Zhu
✸
Bruno Zhu (b. 1991 in Porto, Portugal) is an artist living and working between Amsterdam and Viseu. Recent projects include presentations at Fri Art Kunsthalle in Fribourg, UKS in Oslo, ICA Cinema 3 in London, Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, Antenna Space in Shanghai, and Kunsthalle Lissabon in Lisbon. Zhu is a member of A Maior, a curatorial program set in a home furnishings and clothing store in Viseu, Portugal.
1 Metropole here refers to the homeland or central territory of British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonial empires. The term is usually used to designate their European territories, as opposed to their colonial or overseas territories.
2 I’m grateful for the historical insight on colonial power dynamics found in literary analyses of Lusophone post-colonial literature. An intricate overview from a metropolitan perspective is Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, “Empire, Colonial Wars and Post-Colonialism in the Portuguese Contemporary Imagination,” Portuguese Studies, Vol. 18 (2002), 132-214. For a rich analysis of writer Mia Couto’s work exposing the social spaces created by settler colonialism see Luís Madureira, “Nation, Identity and Loss of Footing: Mia Couto’s O Outro Pé da Sereia and the Question of Lusophone Postcolonialism,” Novel (2008), 200-227.
3 On “displacing” anti-colonialist agendas and the nationalist framework of the Portuguese Communist Party see José Neves, “The Role of Portugal on the Stage of Imperialism: Communism, Nationalism and Colonialism (1930-1960),” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 37, No. 4 (2009), 485-499.
4 For more on Portuguese Maoist activities see Miguel Cardina, “Guerra à guerra. Violência e anticolonialismo nas oposições ao Estado Novo,” Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais (2010). My scrutinisation of the intellectual metropolitan elite wouldn't be complete without also acknowledging their contribution to the end of the regime through sharing Marxist texts and rallying the larger population, who were mostly illiterate and disenfranchised. A contextualization of student protests is articulated in Miguel Cardina, “On student movements in the decay of the Estado Novo,” Portuguese Journal of Social Science, Vol. 7, No. 3 (2008), 151-164.
5 “Europe Socialists Deny Routing C.I.A. Funds to Party in Lisbon,” The New York Times, September 27, 1975. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/27/archives/europe-socialists-deny-routing-cia-funds-to-party-in-lisbon.html.
6 See Vivek Chibber’s astute assessments of the British and French bourgeois revolutions in response to the Subaltern Studies’ “romanticized” conception of the European bourgeoisie in Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital (London: Verso, 2013), 54-79.
7 These theories were appropriated by António Salazar to form a nationalist ideology that glued the empire together. The formation of a mixed-race settler agrarian bourgeoisie and the migration flows from the metropole to the colonies legitimized the race-blind aesthetics of Lusotropicalism. This pernicious “kindness” was translated into post-racial policies in the colonies like the Estatuto do Indigenato (1926-1961), established to protect indigenous cultures. This in turn limited their access to fair-waged work and metropolitan education, exposing the indigenous population to unregulated labor conditions while simultaneously creating a hierarchy of racialization within colonized people—that is, unless they chose to assimilate. One of the most glaring examples of this was the Batepá Massacre (1953) in São Tomé, where hundreds of indigenous creoles, known as Forros, were killed by the colonial administration. The crisis emerged as the administration tried to coerce the Forros to work as contract laborers for lower wages in cocoa plantations (which were largely operated at lower costs by laborers brought from mainland Africa and Cape Verde). The Forros had refused this work because they considered it slave labor. The Batepá Massacre was framed as a workers' revolt.
8 This is my translation of a 1994 quote by Eduardo Lourenço seen in José Carlos Almeida, “Portugal, o Atlântico e a Europa. A Identidade Nacional, a (re)imaginação da Nação e a Construção Europeia,” Nação e Defesa, Vol. 107, Series 2 (2004), 147-172. Lourenço built an extensive body of work dissecting the Portuguese post-colonial national identity. My entry point to his work was Do Colonialismo como Nosso Impensado (edited by Margarida Calafate Ribeiro and Roberto Vecchi), a collection of essays by Lourenço centered on the cultural impact of Portuguese colonialism. Exercising a national identity-on-steroids was encouraged from the 1950s onwards, after the regime changed the constitution to declare that its colonies were now “overseas provinces” [províncias ultramarinas]. This cemented the view of Portugal as a transcontinental country for the nation while it simultaneously appeased decolonial demands from the UN.
9 The ghost of colonialism was internalized as a unique relationship Portugal had with African nations that made it a valuable player in diplomatic relations between Europe and Africa. This was a prominent framework employed by politicians in the 1980s when Portugal joined the nascent European Union. It has also recently been used by the news media during discussions surrounding Portugal’s EU presidency (January–June 2021). The use of this framework highlights Portugal’s political agenda, which is focused on our “neighbors to the south of the Mediterranean” (as stated in the program available at 2021portugal.eu).
10 See UNESCO, Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice (1978).
11 A surprising trend creeps into Lusophone studies regarding matters of colonialism and empire. If the blindspots above allude to a refusal to introspect, the same blindspots allow for a regressive revisionism. In their reassessments of our colonial history, a growing number of Lusophone studies scholars are hijacking the subalternist framework in order to historicize the Portuguese empire. They argue that Portugal’s historical relationship with the British and French empires made Portugal subordinate to them and therefore a subaltern subject in and of itself. Some even consider Portugal to have been colonized by the French and British. Their argument concludes that the Portuguese empire was a vulnerable one: simply an extension of other powers and therefore a “lousy” colonizer. For a detailed blueprint and seminal document expressing this view see Boaventura de Santos Sousa, “Between Prospero and Caliban: Postcolonialism, and Inter-identity,” Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. 39, No. 2 (2002), 9-43. What to make of this postcolonial turn toward the empire as it refashions itself as the oppressed, postcolonial subject? Is this even possible, considering the stratified metropolitan class system in settler economies? And what does this rhetoric imply? Perhaps that this empire, reluctant to be named as such, should be excused for its colonial violence? For an urgent response to Santos’ thesis see Luís Madureira, “Is The Difference in Portuguese Colonialism The Difference in Lusophone Postcolonialism?,” ellipsis, Vol. 6 (2008), 135-141.
12 Thaemlitz, T. (2002). Lovebomb. Available at: https://www.comatonse.com/writings/lovebomb.html.
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A shit show
Bruno Zhu
Image courtesy of Bruno Zhu
The following is an extended version of a text written in response to a racist incident that happened between a fellow Portuguese artist and myself. This became an issue because he is a member of the space I would be presenting an exhibition at, and was my point of contact there. I spoke to the other members and no active solution was put forth from their side. I decided to write a statement addressing this issue, which would be released as my exhibition text. At the time they were supportive of this idea. This May, after I submitted a shortened version of the text, they set up an impromptu meeting at the space, where they coerced me into editing the text to remove any direct mention of the space, the person in question, or his associates. In writing this text, I wanted to understand a very specific type of individual in our industry, in the hope of unpicking this dense fabric that is race, which wraps around our social relations and our identities.—Bruno Zhu
When I was in high school, I was asked to model for a photography project about cardinal sins. During its presentation the student explained that their portrait of me represented gluttony and, when asked by his teachers why I was chosen, he said it was because I looked ugly. Three years ago, I was commissioned to make a public art piece for a prominent shopping mall in Lisbon. After the project was pitched to her, the head of marketing was confused. Even though she was briefed beforehand by the contemporary art museum that the mall was partnering up with, she was annoyed that my work—and, indeed, I—did not look Portuguese enough. She said that the shopping mall attracted high-end clientele and unfortunately my profile did not fit their vision. Last summer at a dinner, some artist friends and I were talking about success in the world of contemporary art. As the conversation shifted to the people at the table, one person—an active member of the artist-run space where my show would soon be taking place—turned to me and said that I was successful because I was a “chinoca” [chink] and identity politics are trendy right now.
During all of these instances I fell silent, digesting their impact on me. I pulled apart the words, tones, and contexts, because surely none of them meant what they said in a bad way? Maybe by “ugly" the student meant the mood of the photograph. “Not Portuguese enough” could’ve meant wanting a more established artist. Maybe the word “chinoca” was used as a cheeky way to signal a new level of camaraderie? If these phrases were not meant in an offensive way, then why was I being called ugly? Why was I described as less than? Why was I blamed for being too much of one thing? The most terrifying realization I have had is that none of these people intended to offend me. In their eyes it was just a matter of fact that I, as a first-generation Portuguese person and child of Chinese immigrants, didn't fit their standards of beauty, nationality, or personhood. That I was a monster, an alien, an industry fetish.
Installation view: Bruno Zhu, Uh-oh, Sismógrafo, Porto (May 22–June 19, 2021). Photo: Filipe Braga
Given that my exhibition was being hosted by the person who used a racist slur to describe me and my practice, I couldn't continue forward without taking action. I thought about canceling the show, but this would only penalize me, and getting him fired wouldn’t prevent him from casually using racist slurs. So I set out to look into the state of racial politics in Portugal today. I wanted to understand how a self-described antiracist and anti-fascist, who attended the local BLM march and ticks all the boxes of millennial leftism, gets to use a racial slur so effortlessly in private. If this term was not meant to be offensive, why is he the one who gets to evacuate the meaning from the word? Why does he have the power to displace history? Why does he have the privilege to assign identity?
I was troubled to see how several colonialisms were conflated into one in this moment, not to mention the sparsity of conversations about the aftermath of decolonization(s) and its ramifications in contemporary society. The latter is an ongoing embodied experience for the Portuguese, as the generations who lived through the authoritarian period of Estado Novo (1933-74) are still alive today. They moved from the metropole1 to the colonies seeking riches and watched Portugal tweak its constitution to become an empire. They watched their children being sent to war while African nationalist movements fought for freedom and these children returned, bitter and stripped of their settler status, when the regime fell in 1974.2 Trying to understand how someone aligned with leftist thinking called me "chinoca" made me wonder if there was a racist tradition in the Portuguese Left. There doesn't seem to be an explicitly racist tradition, but it was telling to see how the Communist Party [Partido Comunista Português], Portugal’s largest opposition party, was never staunchly anti-colonialist until it saw this position as an opportunity to overthrow the regime.3 The 1969 student protests in Coimbra that sparked the beginning of the end of the empire were largely comprised of upper middle class students mirroring the May ’68 protests and counterculture movements abroad. It’s important to underline that these dissenting movements were ideologically heterogeneous and came from across the spectrum of Marxist thinking. Only Maoist groups consistently advocated for anti-colonialist apparatus.4
While the end of the authoritarian regime was critical to the livelihood of many people, the Portuguese left-leaning vanguard was also heavily invested in internationalism. After an attempt to construct a socialist state, now known as the turbulent summer of 1975, Portugal reinstated democracy with the founding of the Socialist Party [Partido Socialista] (the main center-left party today) and joined the European free market without looking back. Without looking back to Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé e Príncipe, or Cape Verde, all decolonized at lightning speed and left to grapple with a five centuries-old record of dispossession and exploitation. Without looking back to East Timor, left to its own devices as Indonesia annexed the territory in 1975. This Socialist Party was founded with financial aid from the CIA, as the US feared Portugal would turn into a communist state.5
Why am I going on about anti-colonialism? Because I am not interested in an affect-based framework for racism. Hate and fear are real, but porous. They leave too many exits for accountability to escape from. In my experience, racist behaviour is usually understood as an isolated event devoid of history. It’s closer to an act of passion—impulsive and quickly diffused once apologies are offered. I must accept these apologies otherwise I’m being ungrateful. Apologies are gifted, and gifts are deemed a good thing. What more could I want, they ask.
Image courtesy of Bruno Zhu
Bruno Zhu, poster made on the occasion of Uh-oh at Sismógrafo, Porto
In recent years, discussions around racism have reintroduced a historical aspect through the reassessment of Western imperialisms, but I fear that this critical knowledge does not produce causal relations but rather claims to ‘expose’ history. Among my ‘woke’ friends, coming to terms with the colonial past of one’s nation has become a moral, cathartic, and individualistic experience: colonialism=slavery=bad, accountability=knowledge=good. I was bad, now I am good. To feel bad about a bygone era protects their ego from acknowledging their role in reproducing notions of liberty, freedom of expression, and progress that only benefit a particular kind of geopolitics. In my case, the artist I had dinner with is someone who I identify as a “legacy liberal.” He is someone born and raised with liberal ideals—his dad was an active participant in overthrowing the regime and therefore he accrues the revolutionary capital earned by his ancestors. He once had a Frantz Fanon book sitting on his studio desk. He dabbles in the critique of capitalism like one must the “age of anthropocene.” He has become attuned to the irony of whiteness via TikTok. Yet he’s afforded a luxurious distance from being a subject of critique precisely because society entrusts people like him with the role of the critic, the voice of reason. Perhaps my ambivalence toward using descriptors like privileged, white, male, cis, straight, or Western hinders my message, because I refuse to engage in the same reductionist rhetoric as he does. But I hope that you, the reader, will nevertheless understand my point.
Even though no explicit racist agenda can be found in the annals of the traditional Portuguese Left, we still encounter resistance in recognizing all modalities of oppression. Instead, there is a focus on privileging the humanity of some over others and using verbose nationalist apologia that is at best dismissive and at worst a fugitive of its own colonial legacy. I am willing to accept that calling me "chinoca" doesn’t necessarily make him a racist, but the ease with which he uses such a term is a testament to a certain bourgeois6 upper middle class mentality that remains unscathed today.
If Portuguese history is evidence of a kind of national cosmetic surgery that replaced its colonial past with European modernity, the Portuguese psyche seems to have skipped the nip and tuck. During Estado Novo, the regime widely promoted Lusotropicalism. This polarizing framework, a product of its time, was developed by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in the 1930s as an attempt to reify the racial hybridity of Brazilian identity. In order to do so, Freyre drew aspects from geography and anthropology that positively justified Portuguese colonialism. He argued that Portugal was a rightful colonizer as the Portuguese were themselves made up of a mixture of many civilizations that had come before—Romans, Celts, Moors—making them familiar with the plight of the colonized and thus kinder settlers; that Portugal, being closest to the equatorial line compared to other European nations, made the people’s blood warmer and thus more adaptable to the tropical climate; that such physiological attributes, along with the Portuguese colonial empire being the oldest territorial presence overseas, justified Portuguese’s penchant for miscegenation.7
Thus to be Portuguese was to be worldly, a body of many races, a seer of cultures and continents old and new. As this ethnopluralist stance created dehumanizing policies overseas, metropolitan Portugal developed a case of hyperidentity. According to the late philosopher Eduardo Lourenço, Portugal has a disturbing fixation for its colonial history as a story that elevates us, the Portuguese, above all other nations. For Lourenço, this hyperidentity allows Portugal to always have an identity regardless of context, one that is less about the collective capacity of the nation and more about being the “chosen historical actor of the European adventure in the world.”8
The scale and influence of colonial Portugal through the ages, crystallized by its abrupt end, became a foundational myth for its national identity, even after the fall of Estado Novo.9 Considering that Lusotropicalism attempted to remove the question of race from Portuguese coloniality, the available critical debate that remains utilizes non-white people as either historical data (for example, the transatlantic slave trade as a rational mercantile endeavor) or strictly as a color chart for the human skin. Within this model, seeing color does not equate to seeing race. The pejorative term “preto” is widely used today by non-Black people to describe Afro-Portuguese or Black people, so it is unsurprising that I was referred to as “chinoca.” I certainly look like one, don’t I? Many Portuguese people frown upon the use of the word race, as for them there is only one—the human kind—and so the term ethnicity is preferred. We could consider this usage to be refreshingly contemporary, as it is commonly agreed that race is a social construct,10 but when this point is raised amongst the mainstream Portuguese population, most will dismiss the phrase “social construct” as phoney, intellectual speak. Here, we witness another game of semantics where discrimination against ethnic groups follows pre-WWII scientific racism. The racialist assignment of identity is bolstered by a resolute sense of post-racial entitlement that leaves no space for the Other to reclaim their subjectivity.
Door for Sismógrafo, 2021. Fabric, hardware. Installation view, Uh-oh, Sismógrafo, Porto. Photo: Filipe Braga
Returning to that evening, I have considered how my professional accomplishments were entangled with my ethnic background, with the latter coming to represent my desirability in the context of the art-market. Suddenly, this racist equation is refashioned, returning to the inevitable demon that made him do it: Capitalism! Capitalism made him think it! Capitalism made him believe it! Capitalism made him say it, so surely he must be excused, even praised for his wit?! Could we argue that a racist slur is justified because it was used while criticizing a larger evil? Are there instances in which I should tolerate being reduced to a racist trope? Are there legitimate moments to employ racist thinking that I need to know about?
I want to think you would answer these questions with a resounding No, yet I can’t help but remain skeptical about how one engages or rather becomes an ally with the antiracist cause. In a conversation with a local artist during the protests in solidarity with Bruno Candé, a Black Portuguese actor who was murdered in broad daylight in Moscavide by a colonial war veteran last summer, I expressed frustration toward the current state of the discussions around race and gender in Portugal. I was criticizing the lack of originality in the language surrounding it: how, instead of creating a new lexicon to translate and situate these issues in the national context, there was a heavy reliance on anglicisms. When I suggested that inventing new vocabulary would probably be the most patriotic thing our generation could do to pave the way for social progress, this artist became scared. She said that “patriotic” was an ugly word, that it was dated and something she associated with her grandparents. She seemed to conflate patriotic with nationalistic. I brought up the same issue with another Portuguese artist and while they agreed with me, they added that institutions should be “held accountable,” without stating what it is they should be held accountable for. They weren’t able to say this in Portuguese. They noticed this inconsistency and it became awkward between us.
From the 1990s onward, my generation witnessed an exodus by Portuguese intellectuals to Central European cultural epicenters like London, Paris, and Berlin. If post-fascist Portuguese contemporaneity was premised on a jump into Europe, I believe the byproduct is a fatalistic, deeply cynical outlook toward local conditions of social reproduction. In no way do I support any form of isolationism, but I can’t unsee how people make use of their social mobility and the shapes and voids it traces. I find these blindspots alarming. They attest to the cultural displacement of a nation unwilling to diagnose its own identity, while pathologizing the identities of others.11
Bruno Zhu, You know what you are, 2010-21. Clothing, fabric, fake eyelashes, hardware. Installation view, Uh-oh, Sismógrafo, Porto. Photo: Filipe Braga
Bruno Zhu, You know what you are, 2010-21. Clothing, fabric, fake eyelashes, hardware. Installation view, Uh-oh, Sismógrafo, Porto. Photo: Filipe Braga
What does national identity have to do with isolated racist events? By stripping the political category of race from its history, Portuguese society has undisputedly enshrined racialization in the production of its national subjects. Thus it becomes natural to clutch our wallets when we see a Roma person, persuade Afro-Portuguese students to not pursue higher education, beat a Ukrainian migrant to death at the airport, hyper-sexualize the Brazilian body, or accuse my parents and the Chinese community at large of tax evasion, human organ trafficking, and world domination via commie-COVID-19.
My aim in writing this text was to make sense of what happened during that dinner. I felt betrayed by my colleague, who had access to my work and personal life and humiliated me in order to show off his inner provocateur. We were not alone at the table, but much like the teachers at my high school and the marketing team at the shopping mall, my friends remained undisturbed. I can’t blame them for living in a stagnant social reality that prioritizes cosmetic change over an ideological one. Many of them posted black squares for #BlackOutTuesday on Instagram and used info-social posts to educate their followers. But none of them seem to have questioned the social contract that has inadvertently inscribed racism into its language. This is why racist slurs in Portuguese can easily slip away from their original meaning, so long as the speaker announces “I didn’t mean it that way.” Then in what way is a racist epithet meant to exist? Am I willing to be gaslit, to accept “chinoca” as a term of… endearment? How should I evade this racial profiling? By emulating K-Pop aesthetics instead? By proving I’m not a member of the Chinese Communist Party? By participating in the production of whiteness for whites so that they can feel visible in this era of everything-but-White? If I don’t, I’m bound to correct the racist projections laid onto me. I’ll have to submit to being “chinoca,” but not in that way. Do I want to produce “race”? What if the mechanism for such production was never in my hands to begin with?
In Lovebomb, Terre Thaemlitz lays out a fantastic observation about the immigrant experience and kinship:
In most cultures the immigrant’s arrival, like that of any lover or family member, represents both a threatening destruction of self and the promising creation of a new social body. To paraphrase Salman Rushdie, it is the immigrant’s seemingly impossible conquest of the forces of gravity (that is to say, “having flown") which sits at the heart of their simultaneous potential for resentment and admiration. The immigrant must juggle a slew of preconceptions and fetishizations—no matter how imbalanced they may be, and in addition to whatever personal baggage they are already carrying—so as to be welcomed into their new family.12
In the months leading up to the exhibition I wondered if I had overstayed my welcome in this particular family, with this host.
On a final note, the works in the exhibition in question had nothing to do with this incident. They were inspired by the blueprint of the exhibition space. The floor’s bathroom happens to be situated in the middle of the exhibition space, following the piping system from the floors above. I had noticed it during a site visit and it came to inspire the show. If powerful enough, flushing the toilet could hypothetically bring down the whole building. In this instance, flushing could be a powerful directional force with the toilet as a portal. One would go down. One would go under. So I pictured the space as waiting to go down under or, if you reverse this scheme, waiting to ascend from the underworld. Then what would come out of the toilet. Shit? A shitty person? Feelings of shittiness? Arriving somewhere shitty? I thought engaging with conceptual shit could be both funny and political. I wasn’t counting on being made to feel like shit in the process.
Image courtesy of Bruno Zhu
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Bruno Zhu (b. 1991 in Porto, Portugal) is an artist living and working between Amsterdam and Viseu. Recent projects include presentations at Fri Art Kunsthalle in Fribourg, UKS in Oslo, ICA Cinema 3 in London, Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, Antenna Space in Shanghai, and Kunsthalle Lissabon in Lisbon. Zhu is a member of A Maior, a curatorial program set in a home furnishings and clothing store in Viseu, Portugal.
1 Metropole here refers to the homeland or central territory of British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonial empires. The term is usually used to designate their European territories, as opposed to their colonial or overseas territories.
2 I’m grateful for the historical insight on colonial power dynamics found in literary analyses of Lusophone post-colonial literature. An intricate overview from a metropolitan perspective is Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, “Empire, Colonial Wars and Post-Colonialism in the Portuguese Contemporary Imagination,” Portuguese Studies, Vol. 18 (2002), 132-214. For a rich analysis of writer Mia Couto’s work exposing the social spaces created by settler colonialism see Luís Madureira, “Nation, Identity and Loss of Footing: Mia Couto’s O Outro Pé da Sereia and the Question of Lusophone Postcolonialism,” Novel (2008), 200-227.
3 On “displacing” anti-colonialist agendas and the nationalist framework of the Portuguese Communist Party see José Neves, “The Role of Portugal on the Stage of Imperialism: Communism, Nationalism and Colonialism (1930-1960),” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 37, No. 4 (2009), 485-499.
4 For more on Portuguese Maoist activities see Miguel Cardina, “Guerra à guerra. Violência e anticolonialismo nas oposições ao Estado Novo,” Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais (2010). My scrutinisation of the intellectual metropolitan elite wouldn't be complete without also acknowledging their contribution to the end of the regime through sharing Marxist texts and rallying the larger population, who were mostly illiterate and disenfranchised. A contextualization of student protests is articulated in Miguel Cardina, “On student movements in the decay of the Estado Novo,” Portuguese Journal of Social Science, Vol. 7, No. 3 (2008), 151-164.
5 “Europe Socialists Deny Routing C.I.A. Funds to Party in Lisbon,” The New York Times, September 27, 1975. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1975/09/27/archives/europe-socialists-deny-routing-cia-funds-to-party-in-lisbon.html.
6 See Vivek Chibber’s astute assessments of the British and French bourgeois revolutions in response to the Subaltern Studies’ “romanticized” conception of the European bourgeoisie in Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital (London: Verso, 2013), 54-79.
7 These theories were appropriated by António Salazar to form a nationalist ideology that glued the empire together. The formation of a mixed-race settler agrarian bourgeoisie and the migration flows from the metropole to the colonies legitimized the race-blind aesthetics of Lusotropicalism. This pernicious “kindness” was translated into post-racial policies in the colonies like the Estatuto do Indigenato (1926-1961), established to protect indigenous cultures. This in turn limited their access to fair-waged work and metropolitan education, exposing the indigenous population to unregulated labor conditions while simultaneously creating a hierarchy of racialization within colonized people—that is, unless they chose to assimilate. One of the most glaring examples of this was the Batepá Massacre (1953) in São Tomé, where hundreds of indigenous creoles, known as Forros, were killed by the colonial administration. The crisis emerged as the administration tried to coerce the Forros to work as contract laborers for lower wages in cocoa plantations (which were largely operated at lower costs by laborers brought from mainland Africa and Cape Verde). The Forros had refused this work because they considered it slave labor. The Batepá Massacre was framed as a workers' revolt.
8 This is my translation of a 1994 quote by Eduardo Lourenço seen in José Carlos Almeida, “Portugal, o Atlântico e a Europa. A Identidade Nacional, a (re)imaginação da Nação e a Construção Europeia,” Nação e Defesa, Vol. 107, Series 2 (2004), 147-172. Lourenço built an extensive body of work dissecting the Portuguese post-colonial national identity. My entry point to his work was Do Colonialismo como Nosso Impensado (edited by Margarida Calafate Ribeiro and Roberto Vecchi), a collection of essays by Lourenço centered on the cultural impact of Portuguese colonialism. Exercising a national identity-on-steroids was encouraged from the 1950s onwards, after the regime changed the constitution to declare that its colonies were now “overseas provinces” [províncias ultramarinas]. This cemented the view of Portugal as a transcontinental country for the nation while it simultaneously appeased decolonial demands from the UN.
9 The ghost of colonialism was internalized as a unique relationship Portugal had with African nations that made it a valuable player in diplomatic relations between Europe and Africa. This was a prominent framework employed by politicians in the 1980s when Portugal joined the nascent European Union. It has also recently been used by the news media during discussions surrounding Portugal’s EU presidency (January–June 2021). The use of this framework highlights Portugal’s political agenda, which is focused on our “neighbors to the south of the Mediterranean” (as stated in the program available at 2021portugal.eu).
10 See UNESCO, Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice (1978).
11 A surprising trend creeps into Lusophone studies regarding matters of colonialism and empire. If the blindspots above allude to a refusal to introspect, the same blindspots allow for a regressive revisionism. In their reassessments of our colonial history, a growing number of Lusophone studies scholars are hijacking the subalternist framework in order to historicize the Portuguese empire. They argue that Portugal’s historical relationship with the British and French empires made Portugal subordinate to them and therefore a subaltern subject in and of itself. Some even consider Portugal to have been colonized by the French and British. Their argument concludes that the Portuguese empire was a vulnerable one: simply an extension of other powers and therefore a “lousy” colonizer. For a detailed blueprint and seminal document expressing this view see Boaventura de Santos Sousa, “Between Prospero and Caliban: Postcolonialism, and Inter-identity,” Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. 39, No. 2 (2002), 9-43. What to make of this postcolonial turn toward the empire as it refashions itself as the oppressed, postcolonial subject? Is this even possible, considering the stratified metropolitan class system in settler economies? And what does this rhetoric imply? Perhaps that this empire, reluctant to be named as such, should be excused for its colonial violence? For an urgent response to Santos’ thesis see Luís Madureira, “Is The Difference in Portuguese Colonialism The Difference in Lusophone Postcolonialism?,” ellipsis, Vol. 6 (2008), 135-141.
12 Thaemlitz, T. (2002). Lovebomb. Available at: https://www.comatonse.com/writings/lovebomb.html.
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