The Portuguese Black Atlantic (1420s–2020s): History, Literature, Film

Graduate / Professional

The Atlantic turn in history and cultural studies often unwittingly reproduced imperial history, studying the impact of European power and forms of knowledge on the Americas. Even postcolonial approaches such as Paul Gilroy’s in The Black Atlantic displayed an implicit Anglophone bias that entirely overlooked historical processes occurring elsewhere in the South Atlantic. On the other hand, scholarly inquiries that focus on Latin America cannot fully account for the specificities that are associated with what we call the Portuguese Black Atlantic, as they still consider 1492 as the watershed moment for Atlantic history. In this seminar we study the emergence of what was known for centuries as the “Ethiopic Ocean,” an imaginary space where important polities, diasporic formations, and cultural creation and confrontations took place around the Portuguese language, beginning in the fifteenth century. We examine a range of materials from early modern Portuguese chronicles, Jesuit sermons, proto-abolitionist dialogues, prose fiction, poetry, journalism, and film, among other textual sources. We also foreground the emergence of Black literary authorship in Brazil, Portugal, and Lusophone Africa within a wider cultural process that we can call Portuguese Black modernity between the 1920s and the 1960s. Conducted in English, but reading knowledge of Portuguese required. W 4pm-5:55pm