This article reflects on the inclusion of human beings in the colonial representations of the great exhibitions that Portugal organised or took part in during the first half of the twentieth century. It analyses the role played by the natives (from the Portuguese colonies), as well as the way they were represented and treated, based on various documents and interviews and on the study of the exhibition creation process. These exhibitions revealed some underlying tensions. On the one hand, they provided evidence of the differences between the ‘civilised’ and the ‘uncivilised’, of the diversity of ‘races’ and of their places in a hierarchy of civilisation. On the other, they extolled the way colonised peoples adopted Portuguese models. The ways those human beings have asserted their existence, under the power of the exhibition’s organisers, provides a means to understand how they forged and assumed their identities in a context of rules.

This article analyses the issue of miscegenation in Portugal, which is directly associated with the context of its colonial empire, from late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. The analysis considers sources from both literary and scientific fields. Subsequently, aspects such as interracial marriage, degeneration and segregation as well as the changes brought about by the end of World War II and the social revolutions of the 1960s are considered. The 1980s brought several changes in the attitude towards Portuguese identity and nationality, which had meanwhile cut loose from its colonial context. Crossbreeding was never actually praised in the Portuguese colonial context, and despite still having strong repercussions in the present day, lusotropicalism was based on a fallacious rhetoric of politically motivated propaganda.

Este artigo pretende refletir sobre a visualidade do chamado império português, nos finais do século XIX, através do trabalho fotográfico de Cunha Moraes, principalmente a partir da sua obra Africa Occidental: Album Photographico-Litterario, publicada em fascículos, entre 1882 e 1883, e com a coautoria de Francisco de Salles Ferreira. No entanto, irão tomar-se em consideração outras obras do fotógrafo, nomeadamente o Album Photographico e Descriptivo publicado por David Corazzi, entre 1885 e 1888. Com esta análise pretende-se indagar sobre a importância da fotografia e da imagem na construção e disseminação de um imaginário ligado ao império, bem como sobre a influência dos propósitos políticos e “científicos” na configuração da representação visual da África colonizada.

World fairs and exhibitions served as important venues for empires to showcase their industrial and technological achievements. Moreover, they also presented ‘civilisational models’ that portrayed Europeans as the most advanced and sophisticated and depicted the distant inhabitants as exotic and primitive. In portraying distant peoples, these contrasts were evident through their dress styles, dance, music, and performance of daily customs, but most noticeably, through their skin colours. With five articles focusing on world fairs and exhibitions in diverse locations and times, this special issue raises questions about the display and showcasing of humans that are still pertinent to the current contexts of anthropology. The articles call for ‘decolonising’ thoughts, discourses, and practices in political and public space in displaying contemporary cultures. While acknowledging the problematics and limits of ‘decolonisation’ itself, the articles reassess through a critical lens the connections between fairs and exhibitions in the early days of anthropology.

In 2020, Europe was the setting for several events that sparked off a broad debate on the need for the decolonisation of thought, practices, spaces, monuments and museums. Historically, several European countries have had a direct or indirect relationship with colonialism and its practices, as well as with the authoritarian ways of managing and exercising power (Cahen and Matos 2018; Cooper and Stoler 1997; Matos 2019). The need to reflect on imperial ruins (Stoler 2013) and to decolonise thought today is therefore understandable. This was not always considered urgent, however. Additionally, there was not always an opportunity for it. In the postcolonial period, debates were limited mainly to academia and, more recently, to the world of museums, where the hot issue of repatriation of artefacts and human remains that were pillaged, stolen, or abusively gathered in the Third World was initiated by the 1970 UNESCO Convention against Illicit Export under the Act to implement the Convention (the Cultural Property Implementation Act) and boosted by the successive UNESCO resolutions on repatriation (Sansone 2017; 2019).