Exceptionalism and the imperial mystique: National and colonial discourse and the forging of a Portuguese imperial identity, 1928--194

This study is concerned with the ideological referential behind the image of nation and empire cultivated in Portugal during the phase of the imperial mystique. As such, it highlights the extent of the ideological and ontological dependence the construction of European collective identities had on the imperial imaginary. Unlike the few existing studies on Portuguese national or colonial discourses, it endeavors to conceptualize how Portuguese national identity was conjugated with the colonial, how the pursuit and ownership of a colonial empire defined both the content and contours of the image and idea the Portuguese Salazarist elites defined of the nation.;The fever of imperialism which assailed European nationalisms in the nineteenth and twentieth-century Europe did not spare Portugal, a country already possessor of a long history of overseas expansionism, to the extent that virtually every household representations, explanations, and ideals of nation were committed to rejecting any imagining of the national community severed from its colonial projection. The construction of Portuguese national biographies and collective modes of self-representation became thus vastly predicated on their colonial alterity, that is, in terms of national ideology and image, metaphysical coordinates, collective memory and accompanying national narratives, and a vocabulary of Portugalidade, the Portuguese intelligentsia of the 1930s and 1940s imagined ideals of and for their nation inexorably indexed in the imaginary of the colonial empire.;The enthusiastic urge to affirm Portugal as a Colonial Empire was part of a strategic necessity to amass critical legitimation for its often-beleaguered membership in the competitive league of European imperial societies. To that end, a mobilization of ideological references took place leading to the formation of the imperial mystique---a hyper-nationalist framework designed to generate an image and a badge of legitimacy for Portugal's dreams of empire. This dissertation stresses that the evocative orientation of this ideology of empire produced exceptionalist claims which defined imperial Portugal, its people, its colonial mission, and the meanings of its historical itineraries, merging into one narrative of nation the concepts and realities of metropolis and colonies.