Description: Focusing on my recently published book, Amílcar Cabral: The Life of a Reluctant Fundamentalist, this talk draws parallels between Du Bois' Black Reconstruction and Cabral's writing on the agrarian structure of Portugal and its colonies. The aim is to grapple with Black Reconstruction's influence on colonial struggles and global black thought. I will do so by probing the reception of Du Bois' ideas in continental Portugal and its dominated territories in Africa, and the articulation of Du Bois' concepts into operative and practical principles against Portuguese colonialism. I will conclude by discussing the ways in which Black Reconstruction still yields crucial insights to grapple with the color line in contemporary Portugal, as the society that harbors the largest diasporic community from the former 'Portuguese' Africa.
Speaker: António Tomás, University of Johannesburg, Graduate School of Architecture, "From Du Bois to Cabral: 'Portuguese' Africa and the Color Line"
Discussant: Steven Osuna, California State University Long Beach, Sociology
"Black Reconstruction as a Portal" is a year-long Sawyer Seminar at the University of California, Irvine that explores the global salience of visions of Black Reconstruction as a portal between the crisis that marks our current predicament and the freedom dreams of those who have taken to the streets insisting that another world is still possible. For more information, go to: https://blackreconstructionasaportal.org or follow us on Twitter @ReadingDubois