The session “Engendering Empire: Late Iberian Colonialism in Africa, 1955-1975” is scheduled for May 19 at 4 pm at the Sala de Atos of the ICS. Andreas Stucki from the University of Bern will be the guest speaker.
This presentation focuses on culture and gender relations in the Portuguese and Spanish colonies in Africa. It shows that gendered education and indoctrination of African women were perceived as essential in maintaining Portuguese and Spanish rule. The first section of the paper sets out to assess the main differences between the large Portuguese and the small Spanish territories in Africa. It illustrates why shared chronologies, institutional exchange between the Iberian dictatorships, and tightly interlinked imperial rhetoric of exceptionalism make a strong case for bringing the Iberian empires together into a single analytical framework. The following case studies emphasize this assertion. They showcase, e.g., efforts to stage Portuguese domesticity in the colonies or the complex modalities of so-called indigenous cooperation and collaboration in what was “Spanish Guinea”. Recent trends in empire and colonial history in modern Iberian historiography are at the centre of the concluding section.
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