This dissertation examines the ideas and practices of transnational solidarity against racial and imperial violence in the mid-20th century Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) world. In the decades following World War II, a national movement for Black self-determination was emerging in Brazil while the African colonies under Portuguese rule were at war for national independence. While scholars have largely characterized the relationships between these movements as symbolic or one-directional to the benefit of Brazilians, my dissertation highlights the importance of interpersonal and tangible encounters toward a mutual ideological exchange. I examine the ideas that emerged from several opportunities that – sometimes unintentionally – facilitated meetings between activist-intellectuals of the Brazilian Black Movement and the anticolonial revolutionaries of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Cabo Verde. I draw on archived correspondences, press publications, organizational documents, memoirs, state surveillance documents, oral history interviews, and close readings of cultural and literary productions from Brazil, Portugal, and Cabo Verde to demonstrate how this network of activists and intellectuals shaped ideas about post-colonial subjectivity, language, cultural politics, and liberation. Ultimately, I argue that this network of intellectuals demonstrated a Black imperial double consciousness. This concept frames the dissertation by highlighting how this network of Black internationalists drew upon their shared history of Portuguese imperialism while also drawing on varied articulations of global blackness in order to produce the ideas that: animated their movements, shaped their language of solidarity, and reconfigured the terms of their international relations.Structured by interpersonal and tangible accounts of Black diasporic ideological exchange, each chapter of this project is organized around the conditions that made these transatlantic encounters possible. In Chapter 1, “Blackness, Africanity, and (Un)Learning Subjecthood,” I use a series of international education opportunities to offer insight into how these intellectuals co-constructed notions of blackness and Africanity as they formed bonds of solidarity. I argue that these young intellectuals both drew upon and challenged the racial logics of the Portuguese empire to produce a sense of shared identity and shared struggle. Chapter 2, “’The only language common to all’: Poesia Negra and Black Grammars of Solidarity,” analyzes the Antologia da Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa [Anthology of Black Poetry in Portuguese] (1958), edited by the Angolan Mário Pinto de Andrade, and its circulation in a Brazilian network during the 1960s and 70s. I argue that these intellectuals used the poetic form to express a grammar of blackness that simultaneously drew upon and challenged the notion that they were bonded to one another as Portuguese-speaking subjects. In Chapter 3, “On a Global Stage: National Culture and the Cultural Politics of Independence,” I examine the ideas of cultural politics expressed by the Brazilian, Angolan, and Guinean presence at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos, Nigeria in 1977. By staging a conversation between two of these intellectuals, I argue that their understandings of nationalism and internationalism are shaped by the cultural politics derived from their specific struggle against Portuguese imperialism as well as the broader Pan-African cultural-political discourses.
This project intervenes in the field of global Black studies by centering people and territories that use Portuguese as an official language, which challenges the existing emphasis on Anglophone and Francophone populations. Further, by emphasizing the encounters and interpersonal relationships which enabled the exchange of ideas, this project offers a materially-grounded reading of the Black diaspora that allows us to reflect on the possibilities of present-day transnational solidarity. Overall, this project furthers our understanding of the histories of Black internationalism, the conditions of possibility for transnational solidarity, and the lasting legacy of empire and the struggles against it.
