Exit ghost : reading Lusotropicalism as fetish (with Adorno)

The main aim of the essay is to critique lusotropicalism as a version, singular as it may be, of wider currents that attempt to mask and gloss over the operations of racism and their confluence with capital and patriarchy. I will draw on a number of thinkers and critics from Paul Gilroy to Etienne Balibar and Jacques Derrida and use concrete examples from some contemporary novels by Antonio Lobo Antunes and Lidia Jorge to articulate how processes of exclusion continue insidiously and fully operative today still. If one is to properly resist the appeal of such a machine for perverted desire as put forth by lusotropical dreams, Theodor Adorno's notion of the ‘circle of bourgeois nostalgia’ can usefully provide an insight as to how lusotropicalist structures perform. Rather than delude ourselves with the notion of either, finally, killing off lusotropicalism, or, worst still, invoking it in futile attempts at banishing it, this essay simply hopes to provide some grounds for cultural resistance.