Une identité réinterprétée : Notes sur un vieux documentaire et recherche autour de l’identité macanaise

The present paper, originating from its author’s innocent search for his identity in his twenties as a postcolonial yearning for an emotion-driven, if not unconsciously voluntary, cultural self-colonization, appears ten years later as a self-reflexive and self-critical essay. It can be read as a piece of postcolonial literature apart, or as a commentary to his documentary Ou Mun Ian, Macaenses (2009) and its textual research (2010). This quest, if not construction or invention of identity, resonated with a cross-epochal public discourse which transcended Macau’s last colonial years and its first postcolonial decade, that Macau was never a colony but a unique result from a China-West exchange. Originally to mark the tenth anniversary of the postcolonial Macau, between 2008 and 2009, the author, who was a great yet naïve admirer of the domestic exoticism and the colonial nostalgia of the mix-blood Portuguese Macanese, travelled across Portugal, Canada, US and Brazil to create a project from filmed interviews in the diaspora, in a government-sponsored adventure which let to the author’s self-discovery. This very amateur thirty-three-minute documentary largely shaped the author’s earlier belief in his undecolonizability and his later extended search and creation of his multiplying beliefs inside an Eurocentric expansion of an European universe.