Panel organiser: Disavowed Boundaries: Race, Whiteness, and Portuguese & Spanish Colonialism

The problem of race in Portuguese colonialism and its aftermath has been systematically avoided in the Humanities’ scholarship. This panel will attack this occlusion, explicitly engaging the Humanities in the enquiry of race/racism in colonialism. It will do so through the analysis of textual representations, in Literature and Postcolonial Theory, and comparatively with Spanish colonialism.

The papers will confront the benevolent narrative of the colonial encounter at both metropolises, Portugal and Spain. We will focus on early and contemporary texts of the encounter, and examine the making and fixating of racial boundaries simultaneous to their recurrent denial. The empire remains to be at the core of national identity, reaffirming national cosmopolitanism and cunning, and guaranteeing the whiteness of European nations against the incursion of black bodies. The papers will both restore the history of colonial violence onto the racialized black body and address its continuities through material and metaphorical practices in the Portuguese and Spanish postempires.