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Abstract
This article is based on the theoretical framework developed within a research project on the construction of Eurocentrism and, more specifically, on the analysis of Portuguese history textbooks. We propose that the textbooks’ master narrative constitutes a power-evasive discourse on history, which naturalizes core processes such as colonialism, slavery and racism. Showing the limits of an approach that merely proposes the compensation or rectification of (mis)representations, we argue for the need to unbind the debate on Eurocentrism from a perspective that fails to make problematic the ‘very idea of Europe’. Accordingly, our analysis of Portuguese history textbooks focuses on three core narrative devices: (1) the chronopolitics of representation; (2) the paradigm of the (democratic) national state; and (3) the definitive bond between concepts and historical processes.
Notes
1. The project ‘Race’ and Africa in Portugal: A Study on History Textbooks (2008–2011) is funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (ref. FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-007554, within the EU programme COMPETE).
2. We are aware that textbooks have a multiplicity of readings and are used in different ways within the pragmatics of history teaching. Yet our focus in this paper is not on everyday teaching practices but on how textbooks embody specific politics of representation.
3. Selection of the textbooks in most common usage in schools was based on information provided by the Ministry of Education.
4. Key Stage 3 is the only stage in compulsory schooling in which history is taught separately as a subject, even though officially there has been a call for its merger with geography. Currently, history teaching has a ninety-minute time slot.
5. The correction of misrepresentations through the use of multi-perspectivity has been often uncritically endorsed in the field of inter/multicultural education. For instance, Borg and Mayo (Citation2006, p. 151) treat Eurocentrism as a matter of ‘misconceptions’, ‘lack of basic knowledge’ and ‘distortions’, despite recognizing the limits of such an approach and alluding to the operation of ‘Western regimes of truth’ (Borg and Mayo Citation2006, p. 153). Therefore, the challenge is perceived as a matter of re-centring the ‘subaltern’ to achieve multicentred curricula (Borg and Mayo Citation2006, p. 158).
6. For a detailed discussion on the difficulties in formulating alternative epistemologies, see Grosfoguel (Citation2009).
7. Regarding this, the processes of transformation in textbooks and curricula are usually framed as an issue of the representation of the ‘other’ (i.e. minorities and immigrants) and its effect on the (national) dominant narrative, in an ‘either/or’ perspective (e.g. Soysal and Shissler Citation2005, p. 7), rendering Eurocentrism as the aforementioned condition of adjective or foregone conclusion.
8. Salazar's regime partially drew on Gilberto Freyre's work, enunciated as Lusotropicalism in 1952 (Castelo 1998).
9. From the Latin coaevus, referring to people and things that exist at the same time, that coexist.
10. All translations are our own.
11. It is important to note that the history of western social sciences, and more specifically of sociology and political science, is tied to the configuration of the modern national states; therefore, the conceptualization of ‘the social’ has been equated to that of the national state (Wolf, Citation1997). For a discussion of the crisis of this mode of categorization in the field of sociological theory and analysis, see Pérez-Agote (Citation1996).
12. We have found only one map that represents processes of political organization in Africa, registered with terms such as ‘African states’, ‘Kingdoms’ or ‘Empires’ (H8, p. 38).
13. The numerous symposia and conferences organized by the Council of Europe on the teaching of history and history textbooks since the 1950s have stressed the importance of promoting the ‘European dimension of education through history’ (Council of Europe Citation1995, pp. 10–11).
14. As Lentin (2008) underlines, in the footsteps of Goldberg's analysis of Hobbes' theory of the state (Goldberg 2002: 39–45), ‘[the modern state] stood in contrast to the chaos represented by statelessness. In the context of the “discoveries”, the territories inhabited by racial others were representative of statelessness. The fathers of European philosophy all referred to the lives of “natives”, “savages”, “Indians” or “Negroes” to exemplify their conceptions of the State of Nature’ (Lentin 2008, p. 25).
15. In this sense, we consider that some literature seems excessively concerned with the emergence of the idea of race (as fixed biological differences between human groups) and, therefore, they confine the ‘modernity of racism’ to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment (e.g. Lentin Citation2004), disregarding the particularities of racial governmentality before that period.
16. See also van Dijk (Citation1993).
17. We make a distinction between empathy – imagining another's emotions or perspectives (‘walking in one's shoes’) – and sympathy – a shared emotion, including a feeling of pity or contempt that does not require empathic understanding. Some authors (e.g. Schaap Citation2001) use the concept of sympathetic identification as an equivalent to empathy.
18. The Sofia Symposium on ‘History, democratic values and tolerance in Europe’ organized by the Council of Europe, recommended that ‘attitudes such as empathy and acceptance of diversity’ should be encouraged within history curricula (Council of Europe Citation1995, p. 64).
19. Boltanski (Citation2007, p. 90) stressed how this ‘reflexive device’ on humanitarian discourses envisages constructing the ‘moral spectator’ (le spectateur moral) through the inclusion of his/her feelings within the description of the other's suffering. See also Sontag (Citation2004).
20. Hespanha was the Committee's chief commissioner from November 1995 to February 1999.
