'Joao Sarmento is a fantastic story-teller. This book is well written and presents in a very pleasant form an original excursion into the complexities of postcolonial geographies. Proceeding with much finesse, Joao Sarmento presents a fascinating analysis of the postcolonial geographies that tourism and Western Capitalism are building all over the World.' Paul Claval, Universite de Paris-Sorbonne, France 'This book ... Read moretakes an exciting tour around fortifications and settlements comprising a Portguese archipelago of empire , one with global reach but here explored chiefly in its African context. Juxtaposing archival research and ethnographic encounter, the author unfolds a bewildering set of entangled tales about imperialists, navigators, pirates, slaves, tourists, architects, planners, dictators and enterpreneurs, in which the ruins of old (geo-political) empires become reworked through the deeply tragic follies of new (geo-economic) empires . The book is also about memory - about forgetting, celebrating and inventing - where it is the crucial silences of today's fort-as-museum that are arguably the most instructive. Furthermore, the book serves as a challenging mediation on key failures of the postcolonial, and on how a postcolonial geography might now respond.' Chris Philo, University of Glasgow, UK 'This is a very welcome contribution to the debate on the spatialities of the postcolonial. Concerned with the material and immaterial cultural geographies of Empire, Sarmento shows how Portuguese fortifications across three continents today represent an intriguing and complicated heritage which well deserves this brilliant investigation. A rewarding read.' Claudio Minca, Wageningen University, The Netherlands and Royal Holloway, University of London, UK 'Overall the text is a successful initial foray into the significance of fortifications within Africa and their role in aiding an understanding of the perpetuation of colonialist ways of seeing, providing an in-depth and convincing insight into the case-studied locations. The text will be of particular interest for researchers working within the field of thanatourism...' Journal of Heritage Tourism 'Fortifications, Post-colonialism and Power: Ruins and Imperial Legacies is an ambitious book, which should be of interest to scholars and students of empire, postcolonial studies, geography, tourism, heritage, and anthropology. Sarmento's juxtaposition of imperial histories and contemporary realities at multiple sites is a useful model for not only unveiling the colonial past so that it is not forgotten but also in helping us to unravel the spatial geographies of the contemporary era.' Preeti Chopra the Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol 50.1, 2013. 'The results of his fieldwork, which included in-terviews with key actors at the Forts, visitors and local people, archival works and observation, are presented with skills of a good writer and unfold the diverse ways in which memory originates in places. It is an inspiring survey of entangled histories which led to the creation of identity of both places and people, challenging the post-colonial tendencies of dealing with the past and opening up a new exciting field for research in cultural geography'. Erdkunde Show Less