Multi-Ethnic Lisbon: From Foreign Land to Global City

As demonstrated in some recent scholarship of post-imperialist nations’ strategies of reterritorialization in the age of globalization, Portugal has managed to preserve the colonialist myth of cultural kinship with its former colonies (nowadays refashioned as lusofonia). On the other hand, Portugal has strongly invested in his membership in the European Union, as well as reinvented itself as a “Global” de-territorialized post-colonial nation of millions of Portuguese citizens settled in different regions of the world. Additionally, Portugal has also emerged in the global scene as a country of immigration, which has already significantly impacted on the number and the socio-racial/ethnic demographics of its urban communities. Drawing from Saskia Sassen’s influential concept of “Global City” (1991), I propose to analyze the emerging cultural imaginary of Lisbon as a place of translocal and cross-racial communities in three contemporary films: Wim Wenders’ Lisbon Story (1994), Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas’ Terra estrangeira (1997) and Sergio Trefaut’s Lisboetas (2004). As I argue, while Wenders’ carefully-selected shots of the city transforms it and its residents into what Sara Ahmed calls “stranger fetishism” (Strange Encounters 3), Salles & Thomas employs film noir techniques in order to emphasize identity loss, and the affects of distance and strangeness produced by specific cityscapes. On the other hand, Trefaut’s Lisboetas attempts to nullify the duality between strangers and familiars by way of documenting the lives of immigrants in their daily negotiations of identity, sociability and citizenship.