Black Lisbon: The Making of Anticolonial Internationalism in Portugal, 1910-1940

In Black Lisbon, Richard Cleminson traces the local and transnational intersections between peoples in Portugal and across the Portuguese African empire, in order to interrogate the development of movements based in Lisbon that resisted or sought to reconfigure colonialism. He analyses how ’race’ and nation were conceptualised, mobilised and lived by colonised black Africans in Lisbon and in the Portuguese colonies across time. Integral to this inquiry is the siting of ’colonial-questioning’ movements in Portugal as part of organizations and publications within other racialised and imperial spaces. To what degree did movements in Black Lisbon accommodate their demands to Portuguese colonial prerogatives? How far did organizations adopt visions of a decentralised ’Greater Portugal’ or a federal Africa?

Richard Cleminson is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. He has worked on the history of labour movements, the history of sexuality and, more recently, on Lusophone anticolonial movements and their wider international connections. His most recent books include Anarquismo y homosexualidad. Antología de artículos de la Revista Blanca, Generación Consciente, Estudios e Iniciales (1924-1935) (2024) and Anarchism and eugenics: An unlikely convergence, 1890-1940 (2019).