Anticolonialism in Early Twentieth-Century Portugal: The Ambivalences of Race and Transnationalism in O Negro (1911)

The short-lived publication O Negro (1911) was a journal created and written by a group of individuals who came mainly from the colonized islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, off the west coast of Africa. This article argues that the publication constituted the first, although ephemeral, black-owned journal to question the colonial status quo in Lisbon in the twentieth century. By means of a powerful, albeit often ambivalent discourse on exploitation, racial injustice, and economic hardship, O Negro articulated a transnational focus for a reassessment of the colonial relationship in Lusophone territories. It thereby provided the foundation for later attempts struggling for racial justice up to the establishment of the Salazar dictatorship.