Lusotropicalism: Tropical geography under dictatorship, 1926–1974 José R. Pimenta, 1 J. Sarmento 2 and Ana F. de Azevedo 2 1 Faculty of Arts of University of Porto, Portugal 2 Geography Department University of Minho, Guimarães and Centre for Geographical Studies, Lisbon, Portugal Correspondence: José R. Pimenta (email: jpimenta@letras.up.pt) This article locates Portuguese tropical geography within wider academic debates on ‘tropicality’, contributing to discussion on not only the ‘tropicality of geography’ but also the ‘geography of tropicality’. It traces the role of Portuguese tropical geography in the colonial project and in the production of geographical knowledge, discourses and imaginaries, in particular the emergence of lusotropicality. While noting the underestimated connections with developments in German and British geography, we argue that the genealogy of Portuguese tropical geography lies mostly within contemporaneous French developments. By focusing on the central role of the Lisbon school (i.e. the Centre for Geographical Studies established in 1943), and in particular the tropical research initiated by Orlando Ribeiro (1911–1997), the paper seeks to engage with the ways in which geographical knowledge was produced within the academic discipline in Portugal under military dictatorship associated with the Estado Novo (1926–1974). By decentring the exploration of some of the ways in which the ‘tropics’ have been constructed and revising forms of producing geo- graphical knowledge, the paper hopes to further understandings of the geographical imaginary of the tropics, unravelling the history and the role of geography in colonialism. Keywords: tropicality, lusotropicalism, colonialism, Portugal, Lisbon school of geography, dictatorship [I]n terms of critical geographies [. . .] the ‘peripheries’ are often central to theoretical debates (Grundy-Warr et al., 2003: 2). Introduction In recent years, a postcolonial turn, urging the decolonization of tropical geography has encouraged new debates concerning questions of the ‘tropicality of geography’ (Power et al., 2006: 231; also see Sidaway et al., 2007; Driver, 2009; Savage & Sidaway, 2009). Departing from Arnold’s (1996; 1998; 2000) tropicalist recasting of Said’s (1978; 1993) ideas on the orientalist production of ‘otherness’, these have been mainly conducted in a context that defines the conceptual space of the tropics in opposition to the (imperial and colonial centred) temperate regions of Europe and North America (Driver & Yeoh, 2000: 1; Bowd & Clayton, 2003: 148; Driver, 2004: 1–3; Power & Sidaway, 2004: 589; Savage, 2004: 27; Power et al., 2006: 232; Withers, 2007: 72). However, the way that orientalism and tropicalism make up their own imaginative geographies also deserves critical attention. Just as there seems to have been an insufficient elaboration on the concept of ‘West’ in earlier orientalist studies (MacKenzie, 1995; Savage, 2004), there is also insufficient elaboration of the concepts of ‘Europe’, ‘North America’ or ‘temperate regions’ in Arnold’s tropicalist studies. This is clearly visible in his (and many others’) use of inverted commas when referring to the ‘tropical world’, but seldom when referring to Europe: ‘Calling a part of the globe “the tropics” became a Western way of defining something environmentally and culturally distinct from Europe’ (Arnold, 1998: 2). doi:10.1111/j.1467-9493.2011.00430.x Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 32 (2011) 220–235 © 2011 The Authors Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography © 2011 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd