Blackness, Africanity, and (Un)Learning the Self: Educational Networks and Transnational Solidarity in the Lusophone World, 1948–1979 (Poster 33)

• In Event: AERA Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

In the decades following World War II, a national movement for Black self-determination was emerging in Brazil while the African colonies of Portugal were at war for independence. Against the backdrop of these liberation struggles, several educational opportunities were constructed that, often unintentionally, facilitated relationships between these movements. This presentation examines how these networks between Black activists in Brazil and anti-colonial revolutionaries of Portuguese-speaking Africa (primarily Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Cape Verde) shaped the intellectual currents of their respective movements. Specifically, I focus on how a series of university scholarships and teaching opportunities abroad were crucial for how these intellectuals co-constructed meanings of Blackness and Africanity that were vital to their transnational liberation struggles. By analyzing archived correspondences, press publications, organizational documents, oral history interviews, and Portuguese and Brazilian surveillance documents, I argue that the infrastructure of international education played a crucial role in establishing networks that were key to the racial ideologies of these liberation struggles on opposite sides of the Atlantic. This study uniquely connects a history of transnational political solidarity in the Portuguese-speaking world through a legacy of educational networks. In doing so, it suggests new possibilities for how we frame the relationships between international educational, racial ideologies, and the legacies of solidarity activism that powered anti-racist and anti-colonial movements.

Author

• C. Darius Gordon, University of California - Berkeley