The Fetish of Verbal Inflection: Lusophonic Fantasies and Ideologies of Linguistic and Racial Purity in Postcolonial East Timor

This chapter focuses on the communicative practices adopted in Eastern Timorese schools to train students to memorize Portuguese verbal paradigms and shows how these linguistic routines are based on ideologies of linguistic and racial purity that reproduce certain forms of humanity and models of subjectivity. I will also show how these micro-linguistic technologies of the self partake in the construction of the Lusophonic fantasy, which has been a key notion in recent redefinitions of national identity in the Portuguese postcolonial metropole. By highlighting the ironies and the paradoxes underlying the idea of a Portuguese post-colonial world language, the chapter will reflect on the problematic relation between language, culture, and speech community. While questioning simple equivalences between language and culture, it will show how separating language from specific contexts of power-relations and cultural meanings can only lead to empty abstractions. Analyzing the practices through which Portuguese (and its verbal morphology in particular) is currently being taught in post-colonial East Timor, this chapter explores the interplay of ideologies of language, racial discourse, and imagined speech communities. While showing the contemporary re-articulations of the colonial ideal of a pure, non creolized, morphologically complex language and its role in the reproduction of racial boundaries and models of humanity, the following pages will also aim at describing how the Lusophone fantasy of a transnational Portuguese speech community is perceived, practiced, and reproduced in the periphery of the former Portuguese colonial Empire.