"We, on the Other Side": Black Diaspora and Education in the Lusophone World, 1950s-1980s

C. Darius Gordon

In the decades following the second world war, Black Brazilians were entering into a racialized political consciousness at unprecedented levels at the same time that Africans in the Portuguese colonies were at war for national independence. Against the backdrop of these liberation struggles, several transnational education programs were constructed that, often unintentionally, facilitated relationships between these movements. As a result, ideas about sovereignty, self-determination, blackness, and liberation reverberated across the South Atlantic as activist-intellectuals traveled toward, read about, and fought alongside each other. This dissertation examines how these black internationalist networks forged between militants in Brazil and anti-colonial revolutionaries of Portuguese-speaking Africa (primarily Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau) shaped the intellectual currents of their respective movements. Drawing on archived exchanges, Black and mainstream press publications, organizational documents, and Portuguese and Brazilian surveillance documents, I ask questions not only of the ideas that migrated but of the routes that made them possible. It is my hope that this work will further our understanding of the histories of Black internationalism, the conditions of possibility for transnational solidarity, and the intellectual legacy of global struggles against racism and colonialism.

About C. Darius Gordon

C. Darius Gordon (they/them) is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator. They are currently a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in the Critical Studies of Race, Class, & Gender program housed in the Graduate School of Education. Broadly, they study the social and intellectual histories of 20th-century Black liberation movements throughout the Atlantic world. Additionally, Darius has written on Black educational thought, Afropessimism, and Black educational activism. Their writing has been published in the Berkeley Review of Education, Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies, Race Ethnicity and Education, and Comparative Education Review. Their research has been supported by several University of California departments and centers including the Global, International, and Area Studies research hub; the Black Studies Collaboratory of the Department of African American Studies; the Center for Race and Gender; and the Center for Latin American Studies.