Political Spectacle, Folklorist Practices, Visual Representations, and Print Media at the 1940 Portuguese World Exhibition

Abstract

Without ignoring the broader theoretical context that, since Walter Benjamin, has considered the “political spectacle” as the aestheticization of politics, this essay seeks to refocus the discussion on the social relationship mediated by images (Guy Debord, La Société du Spectacle, 1967) that visual propaganda produces as a political spectacle and spectacularization of everyday life. To this end, the article will discuss the cases of the Regional Centre of the 1940 Portuguese World Exhibition and its relationship with the illustrated album Vida e Arte do Povo Português (Life and Art of the Portuguese People, 1940), a lavish publication on ethnography produced by the regime’s propaganda organization, the National Propaganda Secretariat.
Trying, analytically, to bring together two propaganda devices – an exhibition and an illustrated book that reinforces the messages of the exhibition –, we will examine what role did they play as visual propaganda. We will explore the dialogue and the interconnection between the two media and with other publications, as well as the interplay between the exhibition’s visuality and the graphic arrangements combining drawings, photographs, texts and manipulated symbols, the rhetoric of “Portugueseness” and the coincidence of those imagery discourses. In other words, how the “spectacle-politics” was formally reincarnated, as memory, instrument and images mediation, in this transmediatic process.