SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE1 Bela Feldman-Bianco

In this essay, I seek to understand the contradictions, ambiguities, and accommodations underlying the remodeling of Portugal from an imperial metropolis to an European post-colonial nation. From this perspective, I examine the reconfigurations of sameness and difference between Portugal and Brazil, in the present conjuncture. The first discloses a historical conjuncture of intense ideological disputes on “what the Portuguese nation should be”; and, the second indicates that the present configuration of Portuguese nationalism increasingly intersects with the politics of investments and the marketing of Portuguese high culture. Both acts bring to the fore the reconfigurations of the Portuguese empire and of the Portuguese “imperial mentality ” in this present juncture of global capitalism