Vol. 26 No. 1 (2025): Afro-descendant Literatures in Brazil and Portugal
In recent years, we have observed with optimism a significant growth in the presence of black authors in the Brazilian publishing market, which, however, does not erase the ethnic-racial impasses in a society marked by its structural racism. In Portugal, on the other hand, we follow the growing tensions over Afro-descendant authorship as a result of the struggle for the visibility of this segment that awakens historical specters that still torment us and that condition the reception of certain texts. As Miguel Vale de Almeida (2022) rightly points out in relation to his country but which, to a large extent, also applies to Brazil, “Portuguese democracy did not know how to decolonize (itself). A demonstration of this failure is the disturbing continuity of the hegemony of the Lusotropicalist narrative. This narrative, widely disseminated in common sense, supports processes of denial of structural and institutional racism.”
History thus emerges, in these two contexts, as a fundamental element for understanding the black and Afro-descendant experience in all its extension since, when officially written as part of a selective ideological force field that belongs to the dominant classes, it is full of silences. In this dialectic movement between history and lived experience, art ascends as a privileged space of struggle and resistance and reveals itself not only in the sphere of ethics and politics, but also in that of aesthetics.
Delimiting the extent of this influence should be one of the first tasks of anyone dedicated to research in the field of Portuguese language literature. Correctly measuring the impact of socio-historical phenomena on the domain of literature is one of the most adequate and effective weapons to combat both the predominance of a sterile aesthetic agenda and to prevent literature from becoming a dehydrated field of social meaning.
In this way, the proposed interlocution between Literature and the fields of Human and Social Sciences, mainly the field of History, is configured and consolidated as an efficient structure for critical analysis and literary interpretation.
In this number 45 of the magazine Via Atlântica, we will welcome unpublished theoretical-critical articles that reflect on the production of black and/or Afro-descendant authorship in Portugal and Brazil that address associated themes, such as: literature and social life, literature and history, literature and social transformation, literature, and resistance in light of the characteristics of the Portuguese and Brazilian contexts.
