Geopoetics of distance: The anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic Negritude

This paper addresses origins, diasporic networks and main output of Lusophone Negritude geopoetics. Less famous than its French-speaking counterpart, this literary and political movement was inaugurated by 1942 poetry book Ilha de Nome Santo by São Tomé e Príncipe-born geographer and poet Francisco José Vasques Tenreiro (1921–1963). It culminated with the 1953 collection Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa that Tenreiro co-edited with anticolonial Angolan intellectual and future MPLA leader Mário Coelho Pinto de Andrade (1928–1990), displaying works of young poets/activists who will become protagonists of liberation struggles in Portuguese colonies. Based on a range of multilingual archival sources, this paper first argues for considering transnational Lusophone Negritude geopoetics, including its origins in early anticolonial and anarchist dissidence, as a founding step in the construction of anticolonial discourses in Lusophone Africa and beyond, being an autonomous part of these processes. Second, extending literature on (Luso)tropicality and decolonial geopoetics and overtaking Anglo-American centralities in these fields of study, this paper breaks the rigid disciplinary cases in which historians, geographers and literary scholars have tended to insert complex figures such as Tenreiro. It namely demonstrates that only applying transnational, multilingual and transdisciplinary research methods one can understand transnational and complex geographies of decolonisation.