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- Convenor:
-
Manuel Teixeira
(CIAUD-FAUTL)
- Location:
- Sala 42, Piso 0
- Sessions:
- Thursday 18 July, -, -, Friday 19 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
The goal of the panel is to bring together European and local perspectives on colonial urban settlements' genealogies and cultural references, processes of miscegenation with local cultures and the resulting morphologies, thus establishing a dialogue between the global and the local.
Long Abstract:
The goal of the panel is to bring together, from both European and local perspectives, the genealogies and cultural references, the processes of development and miscegenation, as well as the morphologies, of urban settlements built in the context of the European colonization.
These settlements reflect the dual influence of European culture and the cultures of local societies. Not only were European urban models adapted to different cultural and material conditions but a process of appropriation and reinterpretation of local forms and built environments took place at the same time. In every location, this encounter of cultures resulted in a formal symbiosis of a unique character.
In the same way that these urban realities were the result of multiple processes of synthesis of cultural elements from different societies, they must be understood not only in view of their European roots, but also of their local roots. Their interpretation must always result from the synthesis of these different perspectives, thus establishing a dialogue between the global and the local. The objective of the panel is to bring together these different perspectives in order to build a more articulated understanding of these settlements, not only from the global European perspective, which tends to emphasize their common roots, but also from the local viewpoints, which may have other frames of reference and emphasize other aspects as well as propose new global perspectives.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 18 July, 2013, -Paper short abstract:
The spatial configuration of the foundations of colonial Portuguese America followed the tradition of classical and vernacular urban lusitana. Foundations reflect any adjustment of these references to the means and resources available.
Paper long abstract:
The territory of Portuguese America was a vast field of urbanistic experimentation during the colonization period. Portuguese references and matrices originated different urban morphologies that possess elements of erudite and vernacular tradition adaptable to the local conditionality.
The physical-spacial configuration and the urban landscape of the first foundations possess traces of this cultural process which involved the adaptation of the scientific principles of Military Engineering, the Portuguese tradition on building cities, and the conditions that the environment and the process of consolidation n of a new society had determined.
The Portuguese expansion is a relevant contribution to the history of cities and urbanism. Different experiences in Africa, Asia, India and in America have given rise to urban forms that are at the same time exceptional and unique.
These experiences possessed a global and local character because the references of Portuguese culture were used in the territories of the Metropolis and the colonies.
In an effort to contribute with studies on this thematic, we will present in the form of a case study the urban morphology and landscape of the Village of Nossa Senhora da Vitória , founded circa of 1551, its spacial matrices and the multiple references of the Portuguese urban culture.
Paper short abstract:
This paper proposes an analysis of the process of appropriation of Portuguese urban patterns in two colonial settlements in Minas Gerais where the engineers’ rationalist plans and the Crown’s employees’ ordinances were assimilated into the local culture resulting in peculiar morphologies.
Paper long abstract:
Unlike the other Brazilian Hereditary Captaincies - that survived on the sugar-cane culture, and that were eminently rural, the mining settlements in Minas Gerais could be considered as true cities, with squares, palaces, theatres, Council Houses. Some of the urban regulations can be credited to the Portuguese government's own employees that served in Brazil in administrative positions, but the teaching of the art of erecting cities in some points of the Captaincy and the local appropriation of the models originated a process of miscegenation resulting in peculiar morphologies.
The methodological procedures for this research were based on H. Lefebvre's studies of the "representations of space" and of "spaces of representation", as well as of the rules and models investigated by F. Choay, that made possible to notice how those Portuguese ordinances assumed urban morphologies that cannot be considered completely dictated by the metropolis, as often affirmed in the historiography of the urbanization in Brazil.
The main subject to be solved is to investigate - in the two mining settlements - how the dialogue between Portugal and Brazil was established and how the local population itself, even supported by the employees of the Crown, have contributed to a more free morphological occupation, although some Portuguese engineers had proposed more rationalists plans for several settlements. In so doing, I intend to bring together these different perspectives in order to build a more articulated understanding of these settlements, not only from the global European perspective, but from the local viewpoint.
Paper short abstract:
The occupations of those (black, mulatto, or white; enslaved, freed or free) who lived in Benguela during 1798-1820 are investigated to better understand the structure of this major slaving town.
Paper long abstract:
From a relatively unknown port town in central Angola, Benguela is now recognized by scholars as a one of the major slaving ports along the western coast of Africa. Recent work by Curto, Candido and Ferreira is beginning to reconstruct an increasingly more complete and complex history of this central Angolan coastal town during the era of the Atlantic slave trade than was the case when this past was accessed exclusively through the older studies by Ralph Delgado. The reconstruction, however, is far from complete. Indeed, one of the many questions that remain to be tackled concerns the work performed by the people (whether black, mulatto, or white; enslaved, freed or free) who lived in this particular slaving port. The question can not only throw some light on the daily lives of Benguela's residents, irrespective of colour or legal status, but also enlighten us further as to the very structure of this major slaving port. This contribution seeks to do precisely that by drawing upon the Occupações dos Habitantes da Capitania de Benguella, an unusual set of documents produced between 1798 and 1820 by the town's colonial administration with quantitative information on the occupations of its residents. Although occupations in Benguela were not unlike those of other coastal towns, they were also singular in the sense that this urban landscape also happened to be a major slaving port supplying, year in and year out, African servile labourers by the thousands to markets like Rio de Janeiro.
Paper short abstract:
The patterns laid out in Montreal during the French colonial period defined land division and housing production up to the 19th century. Planning and building practices remain beyond changes with the British colonial rule or the economic growth.
Paper long abstract:
The French legacy in the North American continent is generally of an archaeological interest for a long gone world established between the early 17th until the late 18th centuries. Indeed the original patterns of a few towns, villages and the land concessions along the Saint Lawrence River were considerably altered after 1763 with the British rule. Nevertheless, the doctoral thesis, a later paper and a current research dealing with Montreal's development during the 19th century, all confront the structural legacy of the French colonial urban development patterns that defined Montreal's growth then, and to a certain degree still today.
This presentation focuses on the structural heritage affecting the land division and the housing production in Montreal. The contrasting lot dimensions and layouts tell a story of spatial hierarchy congruent with the intended feudal colonial society established in New France. But on the other hand, these designs also introduced a sustainable component taking into account the owners' means, their social and economic capacity for their real estate development, and the location and assets of these plots. Housing types built on these lots followed similar goals and means. The urban and the architectural solutions found matched the legal and economic frameworks that echoed Anthony H. King's typologies of colonial urban development. In this regard, the historical investigations reflect the misunderstandings of colonial endeavours, within the French overseas expansion, but also its strategy in the Quebec context; the limitation of a Nordic outpost and the competition of Dutch and English seaboard settlements.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will study the shifts in the ideology and practices of rule as the colonial port city of Madras was transformed from a mercantilist city state to the territorial capital of the East India Company's southern Indian empire.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will study the shifts in the ideology and practices of rule as the colonial port city of Madras was transformed from a mercantilist city state to the territorial capital of the East India Company's southern Indian empire. It is possible to draw similarities between the ways in which this urban space with its racially and socially heterogeneous population was governed in the late 17th and 18th centuries, and the visions and forms of rule in other global commercial hubs including that of the Portuguese empire. By the late 18th century, however, a new conception of empire that was specifically linked to territory would fundamentally transform notions of space and governance.
I am interested in the quotidian arenas of early colonial law, formal and informal, that drew on older forms of mediation and arbitration even as they introduced new norms of evidence, rhetoric and performance. The ubiquitous invocation of the notion of "mamul" or custom for instance can be read in terms of a variety of registers and meanings that draw from pre-colonial understandings of legitimacy and antiquity as well speaking to the idea of precedent that was integral to a new, bureaucratic legal regime.
How did subaltern inhabitants of the city experience and negotiate the coming into place of this new legal regime? I suggest that this process at the crucial transformative period would allow these groups to articulate an understanding of themselves as productive urban residents of a colonial city, and as entitled subjects of the Company.
Paper short abstract:
Urban portuguese-asian sites developed since the early 1500s, structured as a system of small harbour cities, spreaded all over Asian coastal lines.
Paper long abstract:
These portuguese-asian cities allowed the fast constitution of an intercontinental commerce network, for the first time in History connecting South and Northern European cities with the various Asian ones. They folowed basic medieval-renaissance European models in their structure, form and space - an aspect that turned them to be very much unique as they were soon transplanted into the new and completely different context of Asian areas. And they expressed a common "Portuguese" pattern of location, of urban form and built ambiance, as their structural elements were largely repetitive and constant, from one new city to the next, in a deliberate traditional manner.
Paper short abstract:
The structures built in Asian cities under Iberian rule during the Early Modern Period are a prominent sample of cultural transfer. The analysis of the local interpretation of European models will lead to the evaluation of the aesthetic and symbolic input of native communities.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, research about structures built in cities under the Iberian rule of Asia during the Early Modern Period has rediscovered the role of many local architects. The information about them is limited, but it is obvious that they knew the European tradition and sources. This analysis aims to deepen the knowledge of Western identity in Asia through the examination of structures built by Asian architects. Cultural transfer in fields such as Aesthetics or Symbolism implies several stages. The first one: the contact between Europe and Asia, and the second: the webs within European port-cities of Asia. From the construction of the Church of Saint Paul of Macao to the completion of the Cathedral of Manila, the native contribution was changing, inserting new aesthetic and symbolic parameters that until now had been forgotten in contemporary artistic analysis. Initially, the Asian work was merely overlaid on slightly modified European schemes. By the mid-seventeenth century, many native proposals were part of the whole project, as can be seen in the incorporation of the harigue in Manila. During the eighteenth century, this mestizo tradition began to spread from Goa to Manila, but also in Pondicherry and Batavia. Along with the popularization of elements such as the carepa, other sources, such as European architectural treatises, appeared in Asia. As a consequence, many of these Asian port-cities took on a similar appearance in the late eighteenth century. In some cases, even the unique adaptation of European patterns can be found in cities far apart.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores processes of social appropriation of space in the city of Malacca (West Malaysia). I analyse how the Malacca Portuguese appropriate and practice their city and its' multilayered colonial built forms.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores processes of social appropriation of space in the city of Malacca (West Malaysia). Using a methodologiacal combination of historical and ethnographically based research, we analyse how the Malacca Portuguese, (a group of Eurasians of Portuguese Origin, living in contemporary Malacca) percieve, appropriate and practice their city and its' multilayered colonial built forms.
Malacca has been represented in academic writting as one example of a global colonial citie during its successive colonial take-overs by European Powers (the Portuguese, Dutch and British, respectively).
Within these spatial matrix, the social and cultural contexts have enabled the development of creole groups, namely the Malacca Portuguese Eurasians, a group of residents that built their social identity around an imagined/real ancestry of descendants of the Portuguese. Based upon their oral narratives and on observation of their daily spatial practices in and around Malacca, We will discuss how the spatial matrix of Malacca ins integrated into their own group stories and their perceptions of how the local and the global intersect in their people's narrative of collective memory.
Paper short abstract:
A colonial city could hardly survive as exotic transplant of foreign architecture and town-planning, without respecting local geography, and natural and human resources. But it left lasting impact upon its rural suburbs.
Paper long abstract:
Unlike the Portuguese Brazillian experience where barroque monumentality of achitecture could be imposed upon the native lack of power or conscious heritage traditions, it was different in India, including Goa.
The Castillian administrative linkage brought in a visible monumentality in the Portuguese town planning and urban as well as military architecture in Goa since the close of XVI th century, but the Portuguese resources in men and finance failed to support it for long. Natural calamities, trade collapse and war burdens took toll of the city of Goa.
If religious monumentality moved into rural zones of Goa in the second half of the XVIII century , despite increase of financial burdens, it is not town-planners, or architecture experts, but economic historians who can provide an answer. This paper proposes to provide one.
Paper short abstract:
This is a comparative study of Western and Chinese writings during the colonial period that would shed new light on our understanding of the colonial and the anticolonial discourses on the colony Macao, which could be a spiritual source of postcolonialism.
Paper long abstract:
Macao has the distinction of being the first European settlement in Asia and the last of Portugal's colonies. For complex social, cultural and administrative reasons, Portuguese was never spoken widely by the Chinese population of Macau. On the other hand, Western and Chinese writers within or without Macau have written a lot about Macao either as an insider or an outsider of the colony. Thus, a comparative study of these Western and Chinese writings during the colonial period would shed new light on our understanding of the colonial and the anticolonial discourses on the colony Macao, which could be a spiritual source of postcolonialism.
Postcolonial literary studies have tended to focus on twentieth-century authors. Indeed, it is probably true to say that the tradition of the nineteenth-century writing is anathema to postcolonial study, unless it is to deconstruct from a postcolonial point of view. John McLeod points up the problematic nature of attempts at general theories of postcolonial literature, which do not take sufficient account of different colonial/postcolonial experiences, not to mention of course, that the theory relates specifically to literature written in English, and takes little or no account of the colonial/postcolonial experiences given voice in other languages, among them, Portuguese and Chinese. Perhaps McLeod's most important assertion for the purposes of this paper is that just as postcolonialism does not begin with political independence, nor does colonialism end with it. It may well be that literature in such environment as Macao should be more profitably studied in comparative terms.
Paper short abstract:
The aim of this paper is to address how the municipal experience, well-known in Portuguese Iberian territory, was implemented in several colonial cities, as Macao, considering the institutional models imported and the local contexts of government.
Paper long abstract:
In the last decades of the 16th century, the city of Macao received a charter of privileges and duties (foral) from the vicerei D. Duarte de Meneses, in which the Iberian Crown recognized the first legal corpus of the municipal council of Macao.
This charter (foral) was based on the text of the charter of privileges from Evora, which had a long tradition as a paradigm charter to new municipal councils established during Middle Ages, but also in the manueline period. However, in the case of Goa, some years earlier, Portuguese crown had decided to assign another paradigm of charter of privileges and duties: the charter of Lisbon. It seems that the municipal councils in overseas expansion were thought in different ways, probably giving local contexts of the cities.
According to Liam Matthew Brockey, following C. R. Boxer's theory about municipal councils, "(…) colonial cities were always hybrid enviroments." (Portuguese Colonial Cities in the early Modern World, Ashgate, 2008, p. 8). In fact, this "hybrid" situation was due to the combination of local interests with institutions imported from the kingdom. Focusing on our subject, the municipal experience in these cities was indeed "hybrid" and, nowadays, probably it is a "misunderstood" field of research, in what concerns political and institutional History.
This paper seeks to analyze how the municipal institution, brought from Portuguese kingdom, has survived and readjusted in an overseas city, as Macao, where local social, political and economics contexts were strongly well-defined in the modern period.
Paper short abstract:
Macao as a port city is related to other Portuguese colonial port cities as well as to other port cities world-wide, connected through the development of colonialism, imperialism and of the world-economic system. What were the counter-colonial influences in the developments of colonial architecture?
Paper long abstract:
Macao as a port city is related to other Portuguese colonial port cities as well as to other port cities world-wide, connected through the development of colonialism, imperialism and of the world-economic system.
Was there in Macao an exclusive Portuguese colonial architecture?
What were the counter-colonial influences in the developments of colonial architecture?
Colonial architecture has been generally described as an import of eclectic and neo-classical forms from the motherlands and cores of Empires to their respective peripheries. This notion mainly based on a formal approach does not seem to provide an adequate answer for some of these questions. Even considering that the forms and architectural languages of most colonial buildings are sometimes a direct import from either metropolitan, imperial or other peripheral forms and norms, the modes of production and the technological means had always to be adapted somehow to local, climatic, social, political or other, conditions.
A fine example of this was the fact that the church of S. Pauls was built in the coast of China mainly with Japanese workers that, as it seems, were not experienced to carry out the stone work; or at least, the church was built with construction techniques that were completely unknown in this part of the world.
In trying to perceive what the relations might be between colonialism and architecture, architecture have to be understood, as Anthony King suggested, on a global scale, in relation with regional and international, political, economic, social and cultural aspects of the world economic system.