Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

The paper traces ethnographically the emplacement of Portuguese contemporary 'return' migrants to Angola, against a background of past and present (post)colonial entanglements

Paper long abstract:

In the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, a migratory flow of Portuguese workers in direction of the ex-colony of Angola took place. Many amongst them were individuals who, having been born to white settler families in colonial times, had left after the independence as ‘Retornados’ (Kalter 2022). Often accompanied by their kin, these migrants held relations to the Angolan land and people that were often ambiguous and conflicted.

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the city of Benguela in 2015-16, this paper follows closely these migrant subjects, observing their everyday bodily interactions with the surrounding natural, urban, and socio-cultural landscapes, and the different forms in which they articulated their experience of (not) feeling at home, welcome, useful, etc. It asks: How do they occupy, move around, talk about, and conceive the space/place they came to inhabit? In which idioms do they express their feelings of belonging or estrangement to it? Which types of collective narratives are available for them to summon, re-invent, and embody in order to give meaning to their presence?

I use emplacement as a prism of analysis that incorporates subjective sentiments as well as the sociocultural underpinnings of these sentiments (Bjarnesen 2013), including extant resistance from the host communities, prevailing social-racial hierarchies, and competing ‘past-presencing’ narratives (Macdonald 2012) that lend a (potentially) agonistic imprint to the process. The emphasis is put in the relationship between such processes of emplacement and personal trajectories that resonate with the interconnected histories of the two countries.