Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the literary representation and imaginary of Lisbon's urban landscape. Traveling with Lusophone writers and illustrators from the city center to the "margins" of the capital, we hope to offer a complex discussion on the Lisbon postcolonial ethnoscape.

Paper long abstract:

In the context of today's symbolic economy, where cities compete for visibility in the market of global culture, the city of Lisbon has asserted itself as a global city capable of offering a unique tourism experience. This is exemplified in the volume Lisbon Tales and Trails (2018), a pocket-guide promoted by the city's municipality, which assembles the work of twenty Lusophone writers and illustrators. These artists share with the reader their secret, nostalgic, imaginary, historical, lost, underground, dirty or utopian Lisbon. However, even as the reader is encouraged to walk the most unexpected paths in Lisbon and meet the different cities it contains, most of the artists do not include, in their gaze, the outskirts of the Portuguese capital, where social tensions and poor housing conditions exist. The volume also leaves out the postcolonial dimension of Lisbon, which is a key topic for understanding the social and power dynamics of the former center of a long-lasting colonial empire. By contrast, both of these missing aspects are very well depicted in Esse Cabelo (2015) and Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso (2018), two novels by the young Angola-born Portuguese writer Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida. Having Lisbon Tales and Trails as a point of departure and paying particular attention to Almeida's fictional work, this paper aims to address the following question: how is Lisbon's representation on a global stage exposing the complexities and ambiguities that inhabit the city and its metropolitan area, and which are deeply connected with the legacies of the colonial empire?