Every day, we read headlines in newspapers and magazines such as: Celebrities go on holiday to paradise destinations; Celebrity lets her hair down at wild party and reveals more than she meant to...; Celebrities organise charity event for children in need; Celebrity launches her own cosmetics brand. It is not the holidays or parties, charities or businesses that these headlines are about, but the celebrities involved. They are the point and purpose.

Journalist and writer Cristina Battocletti is the author of a biography of Robert Bazlen (1902–1965) that paints a portrait of this cosmopolitan native of Trieste, who made a major contribution to ensuring the publication of Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience. Bazlen was a cult figure who founded the publishing house Adelphi, and was also a translator and a writer, although little of his work was published during his lifetime.

Trieste, a border city and cultural crossroads, a port in Habsburgian Mitteleuropa, and the cradle of an extraordinarily rich cultural and literary environment, is revisited here by someone intimately familiar with its brilliant arts scene.

The Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, an eminent figure in post-colonial and ‘subaltern studies’, author of Provincializing Europe – a book that has had widespread international repercussions, and currently a professor at the University of Chicago, is interviewed by the historians José Neves and Marcos Cardão.

In this section, we show unpublished work by one of the most highly regarded photographers working today: Jo Ractliffe. This South African artist, whose career dates back thirty-five years, is included in the collections of some of the world’s major art institutions, such as MoMA and the Met (New York), the Tate Modern (London) and the Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam). To mark her new retrospective (Drives) at the renowned Art Institute of Chicago, we reveal some never before seen photos that Ractliffe took in Angola, shot at places such as the port of Luanda, the Boavista neighbourhood and the Roque Santeiro Market. What attracted her was to see ‘how people were making their way in this wild chaotic sprawl of a city, full of post-war energy and enterprise and the contradictory promise of a new future’. Afonso Dias Ramos presents this important contemporary artist and her work for Electra in an essay written especially for this issue.

This chronicle by Fernando Pessoa about celebrity is both a philosophical meditation and a code of ethics. In his essay, whose title Vanitas is taken from Ecclesiastes, the poet Manuel de Freitas uses Pessoa’s text to make a claim about our age: ‘We live in a time when celebrity is almost invariably based on aesthetic misconceptions or crass promotional campaigns.’ ‘As for myself,’ he asserts, ‘now that I am a bit older than Fernando Pessoa, I am quite happy with the one or two hundred readers that closely follow my every book.’

In today’s all-pervasive communications society, with its arsenal of technological tools, fame is a conspicuous object of desire, an aspiration that requires no exceptional acts or achievements because universal recognition has become an end in itself. Famous people, celebrities and stars form a vast constellation of people who achieve fame – real social actors who sweep into our world before vanishing as quickly as they appeared. The rules and factors governing fame and celebrity throughout history have been determined by the structure of the public space and by the codes and techniques of socialisation. Thus TV, with all its power to create and disseminate images, initiated a new era in the history of fame that is still ongoing, despite strong competition from the Internet and social media that have introduced new rules into the way the frequency of dissemination constructs fame. Prestige, recognition and authority – factors that once shared a common space with fame – are no longer so relevant, being subject to forms of legitimation that have lost much of their importance.

This diary travels between Lebanon and Argentina, between father and mother, love and sex, freedom and danger, and life and death. The author is a filmmaker called Anthony El Chidiac who was born in Beirut 32 years ago and whose documentary Room for a Man, sombrely beautiful and with a powerful innocence, examines the subject of fear and the desire to be oneself in a private and public world where homosexuality is condemned. In this ‘Book of Hours’ written for Electra, Chidiac states: ‘I grew up in a shattered family, in a divided society, and a non-conforming body & mind.’ There are echoes in this diary of a world in crisis. There is a confession that becomes accusatory in tone, a dry precision that seeks an escape. The name for it is poetry.

With Europe at war and fascist regimes in the ascendant, the Portuguese World Exhibition held in Lisbon in 1940 was the New State’s greatest propaganda event. It exalted the political and cultural symbols and the ideological underpinnings – predominantly nationalism, Catholicism and colonialism – of Salazar’s authoritarian regime. Using art and culture as instruments of prestige and seduction, its purpose was to create an imperial imaginary and a providential and civilising myth for the Portuguese nation. Under the aegis of the commemoration of the Double Centenary, history was co-opted to create a grand backdrop. Today, from a distance of eighty years, this major ideological and cultural event, which also comprised a ‘large album of images’, presents a historical memory that is far from neutral or passive, as the historian and researcher Júlia Leitão explains.

The friendship between sociologist Gilberto Freyre and historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda found a correlation in the books in which each attempted to idealise a Brazil based on the notion of the tropics and Portuguese exceptionalism: Casa-Grande & Senzala (1933) and Raízes do Brasil (1936), respectively. At a later date, however, the latter completely departs from that approach to the Brazilian space and, with the notion of border, enters an enduring rivalry with his friend. It is to this divergence of views that we owe two distinct visions of Brazil, which are analysed and contrasted here by Luiz Feldman, a Brazilian diplomat.

The works shown here (pen & ink drawings, watercolours, paper collage, cut-outs), are from the North American artist Kara Walker’s personal collection – selected especially for this edition of Electra’s ‘Portfolio’, and introduced by Sofia Steinvorth. Walker is one of the most highly regarded contemporary artists working today, and has exhibited at several major galleries and museums including MoMA, the Whitney Museum, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Tate Modern. For Walker, the past is as unknown and threatening as the future, and it is this that leads to the shadows and figures that we see in the present. Starting from questions of gender and identity, racism and violence, her art investigates their complexities and contradictions. Walker’s beautiful and disturbing works are illuminated illustrations in the great book of time, in which history is written and rewritten, with advances, retreats, obfuscations and revelations, ordered words and disordered images.

Jacques Lévy is a well-known urbanist and geographer and the author of a vast body of work (including books, movies, articles, etc.) with significant repercussion. His time is divided between being a university professor and editing the online magazine EspacesTemps.net. Lévy has received various awards, of which the Vautrin Lud Prize – the most prestigious prize in the field of geography – stands out. In this interview given to Sofia Steinvorth for Electra, he speaks about urbanism (its new tendencies and its relationship with politics), cities, people and their everyday lives, open societies, democracy and serendipity.

This is the third and final instalment of Human Machines. Over three episodes, Gonçalo M. Tavares and Os Espacialistas created ‘imaginary situations’. ‘This simple machine,’ he says, ‘tries to mark the limits of a body’s shadow,’ before adding that ‘Only once does the Shadow Manipulation Machine collapse completely. This is in death. One suddenly loses one’s feet, one’s shadow, and the position of the old circumference of the world.’ This text is thus both strange and very familiar at the same time.

For some time now in Portugal, the word super has been used and abused as a form of emphasis and overstatement. Rightly or not, individuals from certain social and professional groups employ it as a suffix, noun or adjective, augmenting what is being said and, as a consequence, themselves. It can be likened to the urge to exclaim about everything: ‘It’s great!’ This optimistic desire to hyperbolise the world is an interesting symptom that is important to note. The author of this entry of the ‘Dictionary of Received Ideas’ moves on to discuss the semantics of the word super.