Paper short abstract:

This paper is a historical ethnography of colonial urbanism in the city of Luanda during the last decades of the Portuguese Empire. It looks at how the competing projects of cultural integration and legal differentiation were performed in space, and how urban policies acted upon the colonized body.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is a historical ethnography of colonial urbanism in the city of Luanda during the last decades of the Portuguese Empire (i.e., from the mid-1940s to mid-1970s). I will explore how colonial urbanism is articulated with culture, social relations, images of order, systems of meaning, fields of knowledge and, finally, bodies and bodily experiences. In this endeavor, I suggest colonial urbanism was deeply embedded on the biopower of colonialism, tout court: it performed, simultaneously, the colonization of space and the intervention over the colonial body. In thus paper, thus, I will re-situate urbanism in the historical trajectory of Portuguese colonial situation and its modalities of discourse on race, law, culture, and citizenship. From this historical contextualization I draw what I consider as the central contradiction in colonial urbanism: the competing projects of cultural integration and legal differentiation. I will be particularly interested in analyzing how this contradiction is played in two moments of colonial urbanism. First, I will look at the idea of segregated planning and especially at practices of spatial segregation of African populations into "indigenous neighborhoods", during the 1940s and 1950s. Secondly, I will look at a second phase (from the 1960s onwards) in which this first ambivalence was "resolved" in name of multi-racial conviviality. I will thus examine the central premises of what I call a Portuguese "Creole urbanism". In this study urbanization as a historical teleology is dislodged and presented instead as a "spatial drama", as an ongoing, unsolved, struggle over space.