Fantasmagorias de África em Portugal: uma contribuição crítica para a descolonização das monumentalidades imperiais

The phantasmagoria is not only one of the most complex and crucial Benjamin’s concepts, that permits to review Marx’s “whims of goods”. It is also inscribed in the neuralgic point of a chiasmus between commodity and spectacle. Situated in the epoch of imperial power (which celebrates itself in the universal Expositions), the phantasmagoria opens a critical space over the monumentalization of the “Portuguese empire”. Not only because this also takes the form of (colonial) Expositions, but also because the modern use of fetishized production of ghostly colonial objects poses the question of the rhetorical redundancy of imperial monumentalism and, by contrast, also imposes a reflection on the “monuments by defect”. This conceptual frame promotes a critical spectrography, alternative to the monumental past, reflecting the “destruction without ruins” of our time.