Periphery as a Work: Eccentric Modernities and Lusophone- -Tropical Rearrangements

Abstract

The last decade theoretical accumulation on peripheries has turned this concept into a fundamental tool to approach contemporaneity. It has become an effective key to rethink the complex morphology of modernities, in particular when the modernization processes don’t seem completely to entail the diversities of the generated modern forms. After a synoptic genealogy of peripheral thoughts, inscribed in the synthetic categorial circle of Periferic, the concept key is adopted to draft the very particular profile of Portuguese colonialism, historically grounded on a paradoxical “weak force” that fed a mythology of exceptionalism of the Portuguese Overseas case. In this sense, a modern peripheral discourse may become an international work of articulation of fake forms and narratives. Such a rethorical and ideological device, defined by the ideology of Luso- Tropicalism - set up in Brazil, that is in an ex-colony with the decisive contribution of Gilberto Freyre, but after recycled by the contemporary metropolis, Portugal and the Salazarian regime, in order to justify the maintenance of the African colonies - shows a crucial but hidden aspect and risk of the postcolonial theories. If it isn’t assumed with a particular ethics of discourse care, uncritical postcolonial arguments may be turned as a exceptional colonial alibi to feed the immagination of a necessary colonial relation. Therefore, postcolonial theory has to keep a very strict link to the metacritcal dimension of the discourse.