Post-imperial Nostalgia and Miguel Gomes’ Tabu

With Europe in a prolonged and threatening political crisis, post-imperial nostalgia, the dreaming of a glorious past that never was, is a current threat. Fuelled by instability, a loss of hope for a better future, and the collapse of emancipatory ideologies in the face of a seemingly unstoppable global capitalism that has entered a savage phase, imperial nostalgia is more than a simple palliative for the present malaise. In the case of Portugal, with a still-fragile democratic society after many decades of numbing totalitarian rule, imperial nostalgia is all the more ominous given the fact that the loss of empire has not yet been properly assimilated by the society at large. Miguel Gomes’ recent and internationally acclaimed film Tabu (2012) plays along this fraught ideological terrain by imagining a ‘lost Africa’ that plays in aesthetically seductive imagery, shot in black and white, the dream of a more innocent and hopeful era in the current imagination of a Portugal wrecked by debilitating and systemic sovereign debt. The film, also effusively received by the general public, appeals to the past and ironizes it, both in historical terms as well as in relation to other cinema and especially its cited predecessor, Friedrich W. Murnau's eponymous 1931 film. A more detailed analysis of the film's imbrication in cinematic and imperial histories can help sketch out an analysis of the complexity of post-imperial nostalgia.