Panel 23: Anticolonial press in Western metropoles (EN)

Chairs: Adelaide Vieira Machado & Sandra Ataíde Lobo (CHAM, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa)

17 April, 9:00 am | Hall B2

“O Negro” yet again: an Advertiser, its Entanglements and Significance

Paulo Guimarães Pedro (Independent researcher/artist)

In its very brief publishing life, the newspaper O Negro, self-defined as the “press medium of the Black students,” produced a meagre yet momentous three issues during 1911. Only the last two of those included advertisements, but both of these carry a quarter-page (the largest) advert for the Collegio Francês, a private educational institution located in the Anjos area of Lisbon, a then-fairly-recent area of ongoing urban expansion. Both the area and the school will figure prominently as backdrops to significant sections of Mário Domingues’s auto-fictional novel O Menino Entre Gigantes (1960). Beyond this, the school will be mentioned again in the author’s non-fictional writings at three different moments (1936, 1959, and 1974) when Domingues memorialised people and places recently, soon to be, or long gone.

What those mentions also do is detail the social atmosphere, interactions and friendships fostered within the Collegio Francês, and point to its actors' wider resonance within the anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-dictatorial movements Domingues (a mere twelve-year-old boy in 1911) grew to be entangled with in the decades following his attendance at that school.

We will try to glean as much as we can from the people the author names in all instances, as well as from the fact that he chooses to do so, and the detail (or lack thereof) that he goes into each time, given the political situation(s) in which the references occur.

We will also look into the significance of the networks forged within the commonality of the attendance of the aforementioned school Mário Domingues outlines, when assessing and trying to ascribe meaning to what little is known of the Georgina Ribas-fronted “Grémio dos Africanos” a.k.a. “Ké-Aflikana” (advertised in another Black newspaper in 1929) within a continuum of public and private, formal and informal institutions aimed at Black, African students, in Lisbon to further their education during the “Estado Novo” dictatorial regime.

Keywords: Black press; Mário Domingues; Lisbon private schools; Black networks and institutions; Estado Novo

An Imperial Anticolonialism: Anticolonial Critique in the Young Turk Journal Mechveret Supplément Français (1895-1908)

Patrick Schilling (Independent researcher)

This paper analyzes the critique of European colonialism in the French-language journal Mechveret Supplément Français, published by the Young Turk movement of Ottoman constitutionalist intellectuals during their exile in Paris between the years 1895 and 1908. While this journal's primary target of critique was the autocratic regime of the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II, it also engaged critically with aspects of contemporary European politics, particularly the issue of European colonialism. This paper argues that Mechveret's anticolonial critique was characterized by a peculiar dualism. The journal was highly critical of European colonialism, and of the violence and racism which underpinned it - a critique which was informed both by the Young Turks' own experience of growing European colonial encroachment on Ottoman territories, and by the ideas of the anticolonial intellectual networks into which they became integrated during their exile in the French capital. Yet this anticolonial critique was inflected by the fact that the journal's Young Turk authors and publishers saw themselves as putative members of the imperial ruling class of the Ottoman Empire, whose leadership they aspired to assume in future. How this duality shaped Mechveret's critique of European colonialism is the subject of this paper.

Keywords: Young Turks; Mechveret; Paris; Ottoman Empire; anticolonialism

Femmes du monde entier: demasculinising archives through an analysis of the Fédération Démocratique Internationale des Femmes’ periodicals in the PIDE/DGS collection

Ulika Gisela da Paixão Franco dos Santos (Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa)

This communication is the result of research and heuristic analysis of “evidences” contained in the 216-page file of the Police Reserve Services’ Central Section of the International Police for the Defence of the State (PIDE) and the Directorate-General for Security (DGS) against the Fédération Démocratique Internationale des Femmes (FDIF) – a state socialist project of gender equality - covering the period from 1961, the date of the first piece of evidence attached to the case file, to 17 December 1973, the date of entry by the PIDE/DGS of the last information document.

The results presented in this paper are supported by empirical evidence and reveal transnational connections between women’s movements in the context of post-World War II, Cold War and Pan-Africanism.

It is important to note that Portugal and Angola played a role that has been underrepresented in the History of Women and Gender in the 20th century. This paper will explore the relationship between the Movimento Democrático de Mulheres (MDM), successor to the Concelho Nacional das Mulheres Portuguesas (CNMP), and the Organização da Mulher de Angola (OMA) as part of transnational activities of the FDIF.

The following discussion will examine how, through the periodical, the FDIF constructed a transnational discourse, guaranteeing and promoting women’s rights and denouncing colonialism.

The findings will enlighten that many of these women were not affiliated with communist factions, instead «where part of women’s organisations connected with broader nationalist and national liberation coalitions. » (Yulia Gradskova, 2021).

Keywords: Colonial Studies; Cultural Studies; Contemporary History of Angola; Contemporary History of Portugal; Women and Gender History - 20th century

Pan-African readings in Lisbon in the early 1930s: racial equality and the struggle for a non-colonial society in the black associative press

Adelaide Vieira Machado (CHAM, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa)

Through África, organ of the African Nationalist Movement, and visiting other periodicals at the time, such as A Voz d'África, Tribuna d'África and Mocidade Africana, we perceive that they claimed to defend Africans. In a time of prior censorship and segregating legislation (the 1926 João Belo Law and the 1930 Colonial Act), we tried to unveil the meaning behind this need for action. We will find a reading of Pan-Africanism delivered in Garvey and in the black American society in the struggle for civil and political equality. The discourse and solutions pointed out tend to bring together all of Africa linked to the Portuguese empire on two main fronts, for respect for the history and cultural and political identity of Africans, and against racism for equal civil and political rights in a non-colonial society, wherever the diaspora has taken the Africans. We intend here to complexify this double anti-colonial front of struggle with the class and gender intersections that feminist and socialist theories brought. We believe that the absence of answers, on the contrary, the persecutory violence of the dictatorship, brought to the fore what could already be read between the lines regarding the right of liberation and self-determination of the African peoples.

Keywords: Black anticolonial press; Black associations; Pan-Africanism; dictatorship; prior censorship; Portuguese empire