Black Intellectual Thought on the Margins: Race, Citizenship and Knowledge Production in Brazil, Cuba and Portugal

Abstract

Abstract In this project I trace the production of black intellectuals in São Paulo, Brazil, Havana, Cuba and Lisbon, Portugal. I argue that black intellectuals living in these countries used writing to forge an inclusive model of black citizenship in the precarious political, social, and economic terrains of early twentieth-century nation-building processes on both sides of the Atlantic. I analyze the discursive constructions of black civic and aesthetic subjectivity published in magazines, newspapers, bulletins and anthologies as a means to encompass the varied forms of publications available from the 1920s to 1950s. Black intellectuals who wrote in Portuguese and Spanish between 1920 and 1950—such as Arlindo Veiga dos Santos, José Correia Leite, and Lino Guedes from Brazil; Gustavo E. Urrutia from Cuba; and Mário Pinto de Andrade, Francisco José Tenreiro, Amílcar Cabral, and Viriato da Cruz from colonial Portuguese-speaking regions of Africa—remained on the peripheries of scholarship. The multi-layered marginalization of these intellectuals could be attributed to numerous historical, linguistic and cultural factors according to each context. Contemporary scholars may not be aware of their work due to the unavailability of their ephemeral production, its relatively limited dissemination, or the lack of translation of their work into English and French. The contributions of these writers are consistently left out of works on black intellectual thought of the twentieth century, which is precisely why I have chosen to highlight them in this work.