ARTICLE

(2019) “The ‘Black Angel’ in Lisbon: Josephine Baker Challenges Salazar, Live on Television.

My first contribution as an author to Eu-topías, a journal on interculturality, communication, and European Studies, was in a special edition focused on audiovisual media and popular music, with the article, “The ‘Black Angel’ in Lisbon: Josephine Baker challenges Salazar, live on television”.

As the title suggests, my article examines a televised performance by Josephine Baker that took place in Portugal on 29 November 1960, during the Estado Novo (New State) regime. The performance included the song ‘Terra Seca’ by Ary Barroso, whose lyrics explore slavery and racial discrimination. Baker spoke during the broadcast about racial and human rights issues. Her pronouncements occurred amid global instability surrounding the ongoing decolonisation process. Portugal was one of the last of the European colonial empires and was the target of enormous international media pressure in support of decolonisation. Josephine Baker’s televised performance can be understood as a stance against Portuguese colonial policies.

As Jill Dolan has argued, “utopian performatives persuade us that beyond this ‘now’ of material oppression and unequal power relations lives a future that might be different, one whose potential we can feel as we’re seared by the promise of a present that gestures toward a better later” (Dolan, 2008: 7). Baker’s stance reflected a resilient opposition to colonialism and a demand for better conditions for those living under oppression globally. So, with no small degree of irony, the Portuguese Public Television Service–the dictator Salazar’s “ideological apparatus”, which was controlled by a rigorous Censorship Bureau to prevent the circulation of any potentially subversive content, especially related to African issues—was used against itself by a “Black Angel”.

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To cite this article:

Cravinho, Pedro. 2019. “The ‘Black Angel’ in Lisbon: Josephine Baker Challenges Salazar, Live on Television.” EU-topías, 18: 123–33.