Why did we take so long to hear the Voices of the Afro-Diaspora?
Purposes and issues of the meeting «Voices of the Afro-Diaspora»
Prior note: Both this introductory text and the articles that follow, by Aida Gomes, Kitty Furtado, Noemi Alfieri, Rui Cidra, and Telma Tvon, were originally intended for publication in a special issue that Diogo Ramada Curto (1959–2026) was preparing, with the characteristic enthusiasm, rigor, and vitality with which he directed the National Library, a context in which he challenged me, as coordinator of BUALA, to conceive this roundtable. In light of the unexpected and tragic loss of such a necessary friend and intellectual, and knowing how much he valued BUALA’s work, these texts will be published here, without invalidating other publications. I am deeply grateful to everyone involved. First of all, I would like to thank Diogo Ramada Curto, for bringing us to a place of knowledge, memory, and history. It is with particular appreciation that BUALA collaborates with cultural institutions that seek to rise to the most urgent issues of our time, and not merely to manage the formalities of their respective agendas.
The idea for this event came from a series of questions previously posed by the organizer as a space for listening in preparation for the roundtable discussion “Voices of the Afro-Diaspora,” held at the National Library on November 11, 2024: What voices are emerging today from Afro-diasporic cultural production in Portugal? Under what historical, institutional, and affective conditions are they produced? What tensions run through discourses of representation, belonging, and citizenship in a country marked by structural inequalities that cannot be separated from the colonial matrix and the color line?
Rather than seeking definitive answers, the initiative proposed a way of thinking through music—as a practice deeply rooted in the diasporic experience—along with literature, cinema, and other forms of creation as modes of inscription in the present and of reconfiguring collective memory. Beyond aesthetic expression, they are living archives, survival technologies, and political languages, capable of articulating the intimate and the collective, the neighborhood and the world, heritage and invention.
It is within this framework that the four invited collaborations are situated, distinct in their fields and registers, yet converging in the way they interrogate Afro-diasporic cultural production as a critical practice.
Telma Tvon approaches writing as a performative act and a means of survival. Between rap, poetry, and freestyle, improvisation emerges as both a method and an ethic: writing to exist, to leave a mark, to resist erasure. Her voice affirms creation as a practice of daily resistance, where celebration and fight coexist, and where the “we” is built against the loneliness imposed by persistent structures of exclusion.
Aida Gomes’s intervention introduces a fundamental unease: that of the late and ambiguous representation of black people in the Portuguese cultural sphere. Through literature and essayistic reflection, she invokes postcoloniality not as a comfortable label, but as a field of unresolved tensions—where the canon, historical memory, and the very idea of inclusion remain permeated by structural silences. Her text reminds us that the emergence of black voices is not merely a symbolic achievement, but also a symptom of a historical delay that must be named.
Kitty Furtado, when thinking about Black Cinema in Portugal, shifts the discussion to the level of image and the counter-public sphere. Cinema emerges as a transnational and decolonizing practice, capable of producing counter-visualities that challenge hegemonic narratives about national identity, race, and belonging. Between the archive and experimentation, between the intimate and the political, these films construct new grammars of the gaze and claim the right to self-representation—without, however, accepting the thematic confinement that often accompanies identity-based labeling.
Rui Cidra’s contribution returns to music to think of it as a situated social practice, inscribed in urban geographies marked by racialization and inequality. By mapping both the transnational continuities of the music brought by African migrations and the hybrid creations of Afro-descendant generations in urban peripheries, he shows how sound, language, and the body become forms of non-normative citizenship. Music appears here as a space of belonging, but also as an instrument for claiming the right to the city and to recognition.
Finally, Noemi Alfieri proposes a reflection on poetry by authors of African descent and immigrants in Portugal, with a particular focus on independent publishing circuits. Starting from literature—and poetry in particular—she analyzes the tensions between representation, creative freedom, and identity-based expectations imposed by the publishing market and academia. She highlights the role of independent publishing and collective projects as spaces of greater openness, experimentation, and the building of transnational sharing networks, where writing asserts itself as a political gesture, an archive of diasporic experiences, and a practice of resistance. Her approach also underlines the centrality of language as a field of conflict — between variants of Portuguese and languages considered minority languages — and the importance of orality, performance, and linguistic activism in contemporary poetry, especially in the work of women of African descent, whose journeys remain marked by structural inequalities, but also by strong convergences in the fight for cultural and social justice.
Together, these six presentations, including my own, do not offer a homogeneous portrait of the Afro-diaspora in Portugal. On the contrary, they reveal it as a plural field, traversed by generational, aesthetic, and political differences. But it is precisely in this plurality that its strength lies: in the ability to think about the Portuguese present from the margins, to question its consensuses, and to imagine other forms of community, memory, and a shared future.
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To broaden the discussion of artistic and cultural practices as spaces for the production of meaning, memory, and symbolic contestation in the Portuguese public sphere. We are currently living in a paradoxical moment. Despite a political climate marked by the rise of xenophobic discourse and identity-based fantasies that are increasingly less shy, even shameless, and despite the persistence of supposedly enlightened contexts where ignorance continues to parade with institutional confidence and a seat in parliament, it is undeniable that there is greater public attention to issues of representation (at least the lack of representation is being highlighted). We can also note a growing interest in the discourses and works of racialized authors and artists. While for a long time we lacked translations and the circulation of black and Afro-diasporic thought was scarce, in recent years we have witnessed the publication in Portugal of essential authors such as Conceição Evaristo, Djamila Ribeiro, Achille Mbembe, Felwine Saar, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Françoise Vergès, Gayatri Spivak, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Universities are launching projects and funding initiatives dedicated to colonialism, postcolonialism, and decoloniality.
There is a growing number of conferences and artistic programs treating this “big umbrella” as a new academic canon, which sometimes means that what was dismissed for decades as “activism” has gained legitimacy after being properly packaged in academic language. Colonial archives are being reexamined by scholars and artists, just as Afrocentric figures are gaining prominence. Artists and researchers Mónica Miranda, Sónia Vaz Borges, and Vânia Gala represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale in 2024. Raquel Lima was the first Portuguese intellectual to receive the Emma Goldman Award in 2026. Isabel Zuaa was the first Portuguese actress nominated for an Oscar. The Griot Theater remains strong, under the leadership of Zia Soares, with a regular production featuring plays and a cast of people of color. Perhaps it can be said that the most creative phenomenons in music and interdisciplinary crossovers, and even in dance, comes from people of African descent. In the audiovisual sector, the need for access to production resources to make films and series with insider perspectives is alarming. Positive examples include the program “Pitch Me” and the recent series “Novas narrativas de caça.” And, depending on our algorithm, we have access to an endless stream of Reels, especially from thinkers in the Global South, who explain to us in 30 seconds various strands of feminist and anti-colonial theories, with concrete examples that resonate with our lives.
All of this may give the illusion that a vigorous debate on decoloniality, reparations, and representation is in progress in academic and cultural circles, and even in the media, aligned with an idea of a more just and socially inclusive democracy. And, in fact, there are enough debates, exhibitions, conferences, series, and roundtables to momentarily put any liberal conscience at ease.
This growing interest stems, in part, from the reflection Portugal has been pressured to engage in regarding its past — with the harsh tensions and manipulations we are familiar with — but it stems above all from the fact that, beyond individual narratives of overcoming adversity and achieving prominence, collectives of people of African descent, artists, and associations have made their voices heard. Anti-racist activism has grown stronger, protest has become more visible in the streets and on social media, and inequalities in access to housing and social mobility have finally begun to receive some media attention, even if they are often treated as a recent issue, or only when there is “uncontrolled anger,” rather than as long-standing structural problems. There are more complaints, both globally and locally, struggles have become globalized, and there is less submission to the old “good immigrant” syndrome, where people are taught to obey, be grateful, and keep quiet. A major generational shift and change in the nature of these struggles is marked by the emergence of the Vida Justa Movement, which has served as a testing ground for social conflicts and for nonpartisan, street-level political action.
However, the truth is that we have celebrated more than fifty years of democracy and the end of colonialism as a political regime, and yet, as in many other postcolonial societies, we continue to experience profoundly unequal social, housing, and economic conditions, all of which are shaped by racial divisions. The construction of a public space that is truly representative of Portugal’s sociocultural fabric, and the fight against the persistent legacy of the colonial way of life, remain largely unfulfilled. The “it could be worse” logic — that comfortable belief that some steps have already been taken toward representation and so perhaps it is not appropriate to dwell too much on the issue — cannot serve as a moral anesthetic. The cultural sector, a privileged arena for cultivating sensitivity, imagination, and critical thinking, continues to lack the effective inclusion of racialized people in decision-making positions: in management, on curatorial councils (until recently there were two black programmers at TBA—Melissa Rodrigues and Yaw Temble — who have since stepped down), in museums, in publishing houses, in programming circuits, in the media, and in arts schools. Access to the ongoing act of writing, publishing, exhibiting, filming, speaking at conferences, frequenting cultural institutions, and occupying public space on equal terms will not be resolved by a naive faith in meritocracy, especially in a country where merit often benefits from good social connections, illustrious surnames, and invisible inheritances.
“Decolonial practices” often remain confined to minority circles and are not immune to flaws. Institutional programs and debates frequently get caught up in superficial multiculturalism, the exoticization of otherness, or a self-centered approach to Portugal’s colonial past, as if the main tragedy of colonialism were the retrospective discomfort of the former metropolis. Even music — an area where black people have always had greater visibility — remains limited by a narrow horizon of expectations and predictable categories of legitimacy. And then, that fundamental reflection: if discourses, theories, and practices continue, in many cases, without real correspondence to citizenship and rights in our society, in a broader sense, we must continue to think seriously about structural racism, still held hostage by the persistent fiction of a naturally tolerant country incapable of fully acknowledging its traumas and prejudices. Simply connect the dots between yesterday and today to recognize clear continuities in the logic of segregation and the unequal distribution of quality of life.
The right to the city offers a particularly clear example: urban geography reveals how racialized populations have been pushed into impoverished peripheries, devoid of infrastructure and vulnerable even in terms of their physical safety, a reality that usually only sparks national outrage when it produces images impossible to ignore on the evening news. I believe that artistic production is able, and has been able, without sacrificing its creative freedom, to make some of these wounds visible and to bring the cultural debate closer to the concrete experiences of people directly affected by coloniality and racism. It seems fundamental to me that creation and criticism go hand in hand, allowing for the emergence of new aesthetics capable of embracing complex realities and composite, fluid identities.
We need to evaluate whether we already have the necessary tools to combat structural racism in the arts as well, beyond institutional rhetoric and occasional commitments to diversity. These are reflections that UNA (Black Union of the Arts) has been promoting very competently. On the social level, effective political accountability is equally indispensable in the creation of public policies to promote culture and the arts that combat exclusion and segregation, with structural effects on the lives of racialized populations, and not merely symbolic programs that are photogenic enough for reports. In this debate, we proposed to better understand some aspects of Afro-diasporic production in the fields of literature, film, and music, with special attention to women’s perspectives. Given the lack of historical documentation, it is often necessary to work with absences. As a research approach, the interrogative formulation—which acknowledges gaps that cannot always be filled — allows us to keep asking: what did they say? What did they do? What do we still not know? And perhaps also the central question: why did it take us so long to listen?
In the representation of Black voices, which identities are being reshaped, and which conventions and canons are being challenged? What do these narratives of the African diaspora reveal about the intersecting moments in Portuguese, Angolan, and Cape Verdean history? How do these same voices perceive the exclusion and occupation of the city? What contexts of migration do we encounter across different languages and generations? What are the difficulties, but also the potential, for black women in the Portuguese arts scene?
