Colonial Aspirations: Connecting Three Points of the Portuguese Black Atlantic

Abstract

Current scholarship that has revisited Portuguese colonial relationships with the Atlantic islands and mainland African countries of Guinea Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique, not to mention Brazil, is finding new ways of articulating the history of ideas with national history and microhistory, unveiling complex and multifaceted demographic, political, social, religious, and cultural strands (Pétré-Grenouilleau 2004: 16). In some instances, new findings are enriching earlier debates on unity and disunity in the long tradition of empire.¹ In others, traditional emphases on the unidirectional navigational flows of the transatlantic slave trade have been revised in the light of cultural, linguistic, and religious concerns. Revisionists highlight the multidirectional migratory patterns of returning Africans from the Americas and the Atlantic islands, and the migrations of Portuguese, Brazilians, and Africans to and from Brazil, the Atlantic islands, and Portugal during and after the Portuguese colonial experience abroad (Mann and Bay 2001; Turner 1975; Guran 2000; Carneiro da Cunha 1985; Ferreira in this volume). In some cases, the concept of the Black Atlantic has been extended to embrace Mozambique and beyond, in line with the dynamics and the interconnections of the transatlantic slave trade and other commercial trajectories in the South Atlantic (Alencastro 2000; Curto and Soulodre 2001: 243–258; Capela 2005). Although recent research engages the diaspora in terms of the cultural dynamics of the Portuguese Black Atlantic, unresolved issues include what Tiffany Patterson and Robin Kelley identify as the linkages that tie the process of the diaspora together and that also contribute to its unmaking (2000: 11–45).