Black Migration, Citizenship, and Racial Capital in Post-Imperial Portugal

Abstract

This chapter proposes an interrogation of how Black cultural producers in Portugal have gauged these while situating their experiences of systemic racism in Portugal into longer histories of coloniality and racial capitalism. In the process, these producers propose radical revisions of the interwoven matrices of Portuguese nationality-making and anti-Blackness while laboring toward and situating themselves within broader Black diasporic epistemologies and worldmaking. To this end, this chapter will put in conversation works from distinct cultural genres such as Telma Tvon’s novel, O preto mais português [The Most Portuguese Black Man] (2017) and rap artist Valete’s “Quando o sorriso morre” [“When the Smile Dies”] (2012). These works propose alternate and emerging counter-hegemonic historiographies of Portuguese colonialism and Eurocentric coloniality more broadly that contextualize postcolonial African migration to the metropolis into a longer history of the transatlantic slave trade and the Portuguese state’s dominant role in it, the trafficking of enslaved African people into the metropolis, and the long-durée mechanisms of colonial extraction.