Has the concept of censorship gone astray? How to operationalize muddy waters? Half a century of censorship in Portugal

ABSTRACT

Censorship studies are currently facing an important conceptual change towards enlarging the phenomena deemed to be censorial (class, race, gender), while risking losing sight of the conceptual specificity of what censorship means. If everything is censorship, then the concept loses explanatory power, but if we restrict the concept it fails to account for the multiple forms censorship takes to be powerful. By mapping censorship studies about the Portuguese dictatorship (1926–1974), we propose an overreaching framework to study the censorship phenomenon in general that articulates its institutional-regulatory and socio-structural dimensions. This articulation enables us to understand the dynamics, productivity and mutations of the regulatory dimension, without losing the conceptual specificity of censorship by assuming that only when this dimension manifests itself can structural constraints be considered part of the censorship process. This framework allows to identify which scientific areas, their preferential objects and methodologies, facilitate an articulated approach to censorship.

KEYWORDS:

• Censorship
• Estado Novo
• new censorship theory
• methodology
• media history

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Undergraduate monographs were excluded as they do not need to present original contributions.

2. Scopus was not included since Web of Science covers the publications of the former, avoiding thus duplication of references (Singh et al. 2021, 5137).

3. 30 items were not available. However, these absences do not produce a significant bias in our results, as they are a minority, and some of its authors are already represented.

4. A total of 104 doctoral and master’s theses. The dominant areas are history (16 MA and 10 PhDs), communication (15 MA and 7 PhDs), literary studies (9 MA and 12 PhDs), sociology (6 PhDs) and translation (5 MAs).

5. 8 collective projects between 2002 and 2020: “Living Memories of Journalism” (2002); “Theorization of Journalism in Portugal: From the Origins to April 1974” (2008); “Censorship and Methods of Information Control in Drama and Cinema. Before, During and after Estado Novo” (2010); “Media, Reception and Memory: Female Audiences in the New State” (2010); “Printed Photography. Image and Propaganda in Portugal (1934–1974) (2014); “Towards a History of Journalism in Portugal” (2017); “Broadcasting in the Portuguese Empire: Nationalism, Colonialism, Identity” (2017); “Intercultural Literature in Portugal (1930–2000): A Critical Bibliography” (2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e tecnologia (FCT), under grant “Censorship(s):an analytic model of censorial processes.” (EXPL/COM-OUT/0831/2021), with DOI: http://doi.org/10.54499/EXPL/COM-OUT/0831/2021. Rita Luís is also supported by FCT; under grant “Entangled Iberian Censorship” (CEECIND/02813/2017/CP1463/CT0019) with DOI: http://doi.org/10.54499/CEECIND/02813/2017/CP1463/CT0019.