<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

HAL
open science

# Geopoetics of distance: The anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic Negritude

Federico Ferretti

► To cite this version:

Federico Ferretti. Geopoetics of distance: The anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic Negritude. Geoforum, 2025, 163, 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317. hal-05066628

HAL Id: hal-05066628

https://hal.science/hal-05066628v1

Submitted on 14 May 2025

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

Public Domain
**Prof FEDERICO FERRETTI – BA, MA, PhD,** Professore Ordinario di Geografia/Full Professor of Geography, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Educazione "G.M. Bertin", Studio 70, Via Filippo Re 6, 40126 Bologna, Italy
federico.ferretti6@unibo.it +39 051 2091609
https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/federico.ferretti6 ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5446-6522; Scopus ID: 55540917000; Web of Science ID: AAR-9553-2021; Google Scholar; ResearchGate; Academia.edu; LinkedIn; CNPq-Lattes.

**Geopoetics of distance: The anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic Negritude**

**Abstract:** 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.

**Keywords:** Geopoetics; Negritude; Anticolonialism; Anarchism; Diasporas

Based on a range of multilingual archival sources, this paper addresses the movement of Lusophone Negritude discussing its transnational scholarly and activist networks, origins and main output. While Negritude is mainly known thanks to famous Francophone authors such as Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) and Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001), the Lusophone expressions of this international and

F. Ferretti, 2025: “Geopoetics of distance: the anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic negritude”, **Geoforum**, 163, 104317, 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317
multilingual field had more obscure representatives, who were sometimes dissidents even within their
own political groups of origin. Recent scholarship on African literature also attributes the
underrepresentation of outputs in Portuguese, in relation to texts in English or French, to the 'uneven
conditions of book publication and distribution ... shaped in the crucible of colonialism, embattled
decolonization, and latter-day globalization' (Helgesson and Stella 2023, 140). The 'first expression
of Portuguese-speaking Negritude'<fnref n="1" /> was the poetry book *Ilha de Nome Santo* by São Tomé e Príncipe-
born geographer and poet Francisco José Vasques Tenreiro (1921-1963) (Sousa 2010). Born to a
Black proletarian woman and a White administrator within one of the informal relations that colonial
authorities encouraged to ' populate' Portuguese possessions, engineering *mestiçagem* as later claimed
by Luso-tropicalism (Castelo 1999), Tenreiro was brought to Lisbon when he was two years old by
his paternal family to receive a European education, cutting all links with his maternal ancestry. Under
the supervision of Orlando Ribeiro (1911-1997), Tenreiro became a geographer at *Centro de
Estudos Geográficos* (CEG), participating in international geographical congresses and enjoying
fellowships to study in the UK in the mid-1950s. Africa fieldwork finally allowed him catching up
with his roots (Ribeiro 1963).

This intimate fracture and the suffering for the overt racism that Black and Mixed-Race people
suffered in Portugal under Salazar's fascist regime inspired Tenreiro's (geo)poetic work as a
protagonist of Lusophone Negritude culminating with the 1953 collection *Poesia Negra de Expressão
Portuguesa*<fnref n="2" /> [hereafter PNP]. Tenreiro co-edited this volume with anticolonial Angolan intellectual
Mário Coelho Pinto de Andrade (1928-1990), future President of MPLA (*Movimento Popular de
Libertação de Angola*) and with Portuguese painter António Pimentel Domingues (1921-2004), the
son of anarchist journalist Mário Domingues (1899-1977). This latter shared the same origin as
Tenreiro, being born in Príncipe Island to a Black woman and a White settler and then raised in Lisbon
(Garcia 2022). Published by the ephemeral *Centro de Estudos Africanos* (CEA) and illustrated by
Domingues, PNP contained poems by: Tenreiro; Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén (1902-1989)
whom the editors considered as a main inspiration alongside Césaire and Langston Huges (1901-
1967); Alda do Espírito Santo (1926-2010) from São Tomé; future Angolan President Agostinho Neto
(1922-1979), who will eventually break with Andrade when this latter refused Neto's alignment with

<footnote n="1">¹ Fundação Mário Soares e Maria Barroso, Fundo Mário Pinto de Andrade (hereafter FMS-MPA), M.P. Andrade, Entrevista, 04356.005.001. All original texts in languages other than English have been translated by the author.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² FMS-MPA, *Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa*, 02969.082.002.</footnote>
the Soviet Bloc (Parreira 2000; Pimenta 2006); António Jacinto (1924-1991) from Angola; Noémia de Sousa (1926-2002) from Mozambique and Angolan Viriato da Cruz (1926-1973), likewise a future MPLA dissident. This group was full part of the transnational formation of anticolonial Lusophone networks, considering that other leaders such as Amílcar Cabral (1924-1973) participated to the CEA and practiced poetry as a mean of cultural and political expression (Andrade 1997; Mata 2010).

This paper is based on Negritude original texts and on little-studied archives such as Andrade's materials surviving at the Mário Soares and Maria Barroso Foundation, and the folders of the infamous PIDE (Policia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado), the Portuguese political police. Extending at the same time literature on decolonial geo poetics and (Luso)tropicality, and literary studies arguing for rediscovering places and networks of anticolonial Negritude (Reza 2024), this paper develops a twofold argument. First, it reconsiders Lusophone Negritude and its origins in early anticolonial anarchism (Anderson 2007; Domingues 2022) as a key factor in building diasporic and transnational anticolonial networks in former African Portuguese colonies. Here, Negritude should not be considered as a finalistic step that was overtaken later by most radical approaches, but as an autonomous and intrinsic part of that struggle.

Second, this paper questions the institutionally and disciplinarily bounded readings through which most authors have addressed complex figures such as Tenreiro, as a rigid separation often appears between Tenreiro’s ‘geographic’ and ‘poetic’ works depending on the disciplinary affiliation of the authors addressing this figure. Moreover, appreciations of Tenreiro’s political legacy fluctuate between his celebration as a hero of São Toméan independence (Sampaio 2022) and his full or partial dismissal as someone who ‘moved back’ (Rocha 2010, 45) from anticolonial fight or even a sort of colonial collaborationist (Seibert 2010 and 2013). I instead argue that the most telling critical geographies produced by Tenreiro were his geo poetic works. While Tenreiro’s canonical ‘geographical’ works were published by state colonial institutions and subject to censorship, poetry was Tenreiro’s freest field of expression. Thus, I show that only addressing the production of this knowledge in its contexts and networks allows for transdisciplinary understandings and transnational geographies of decolonisation.

Several geographers have mentioned Tenreiro’s work in recent years, often in relation with (Luso)tropicalism. In postcolonial studies, critiques of traditional European visions of tropicality

F. Ferretti, 2025: “Geopoetics of distance: the anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic negritude”, **Geoforum**, 163, 104317, [10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317)
constitute an established field of study since a couple of decades (Driver and Martins 2005; Arnold
2000; Sidaway et al. 2018). Yet, the tropical world was not only considered as a space for projecting
orientalist and imperial dreams, but also a place to learn different, or even dissident, social practices
(Bowd and Clayton 2019, Power and Sidaway 2004, Clayton 2013). Dan Clayton mentions Tenreiro
in his discussion of ‘unhomely tropicality’. For Clayton, this definition can be applied to Ribeiro, and
to French tropical geographer Pierre Gourou (1900-1999), to indicate a sort of liminality in relation
to mainstream tropicalism, opening the way to more empathetic views of the Tropics (Clayton 2022).
While most histories of Portuguese geography tend to portray Tenreiro as a scholar essentially
working under the shadow of Ribeiro and straightforwardly a ‘Portuguese’ (Paiva and Oliveira 2021),
I would instead contend that geo-poetics constituted Tenreiro’s originality in relation to Ribeiro’s
traditionalist views of geography. It is worth noting that Ribeiro, a White Portuguese, directly
collaborated with Salazar (Xavier 2018) despite his claims for an illusory geography’s extraneity from
politics (Ribeiro 1963) and even gave (albeit benevolent) information on Tenreiro to the PIDE.<fnref n="3" />

Portuguese scholarship also highlights the Luso-tropicalism of Ribeiro’s ‘school’. Famously inspired
by Gilberto Freyre’s works on traditional Northeastern Brazilian societies and especially *Casa
Grande e Senzala* (Freyre 1934), Luso-tropicalism (Power 2020) was harshly criticised by both
Brazilian Black activists (Nascimento 2017) and African anticolonialists, of which the earliest was
Andrade in a 1955 paper published by Paris Negritude journal *Présence Africaine* with his pseudonym
Buanga Fele (1955). Luso-tropicalism alleged that the Portuguese were more ‘humane’ colonisers
than the Anglo-Saxons because they were more available for miscegenation. Yet, this contradicted
the very reality of this kind of miscegenation, which was based on violence, abuse and rapes. Freyre
also placed himself at the direct service of late Portuguese empire in the 1950s, giving ideological
cover to Salazar’s post-war attempts to maintain colonies in Africa (Cape Verde, Guiné Bissau, São
Tomé e Príncipe, Angola and Mozambique) and Asia (Goa [until 1961], Macau and East Timor)
(Castelo 1999; Dávila 2010; Sidaway and Power 2005). Sarmento, Pimenta and Azevedo discuss how
Ribeiro shared this ‘intellectual perspective … with Marcelo Caetano’ (Pimenta et al. 2011, 225), then
minister and future Salazar’s successor in 1968.

It was in Lisbon that Freyre's early contesters went to see him at the eve of Freyre's 1951 journey to
Angola funded by the Portuguese government, to try (naively) to open the eyes of the Brazilian

<footnote n="3">³ Lisbon, Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo (hereafter PT/TT/...) PIDE/D-A/003/04220, Memorial, February 1954.</footnote>
scholar by showing him the existence of an incipient African opposition. Thus, African students designated Andrade for showing to Freyre a map of schools in Angola, which demonstrated the scandalous unbalance in scholarship between White and Black populations. According to Andrade, the results of the meeting were deceiving, and Freyre, in his book *Aventura e Rotina*, 'reproduced [their] conversation in a falsified way' alleging a division 'between moderates and radicals' in the African group to undermine Andrade. At the end, for Andrade, 'our divergence was over Luso-Tropicalism'.<fnref n="4" /> One of Andrade's critiques to Luso-tropicalism was that it never applied to African colonies. As recent scholarship confirms, 'although public discourse praised miscegenation, Portuguese colonialism practiced its own version of apartheid' (Can 2023, 152) and, in countries like Angola and Mozambique, miscegenation rates were lower than in other African countries. Works on Brazilian diplomatic histories highlight how Freyre's views and personal actions influenced Brazilian politics between the 1950s and the 1970s, when both 'democratic' and 'dictatorial' governments were unable to take distances from Portuguese late colonial politics, despite widespread claims for rescuing Afro-Brazilian traditions and connecting them with independent Africa (Dávila 2010).

As for geographers, their general alignment with Luso-tropicalism and with Salazar's regime led to 'geographical imagination [that] possessed the same ambiguity of postwar Portuguese geopolitical discourse as a whole' (Pimenta et al. 2011, 225). This was especially the case with the 'Lisbon School of Geography, organised around Orlando Ribeiro and the CEG since the half of the twentieth century' (Oliveira 2022). Tenreiro was associated with missions in tropical Africa, namely in São Tomé, to write his thesis. Although written by someone who did not enjoy complete freedom of expression, Tenreiro's correspondences to the CEG, alongside his photographic collection (Oliveira and Domingues 2024), show his interest in working also beyond institutional agendas, as researchers should be 'impertinent, given their greedy and limitless curiosity' (Oliveira 2022).

Studies on 'national' geographical schools, even 'compared', often risk overlooking the transnational and eventually oceanic nature of both colonial and anticolonial expressions of cultures (such as Luso-tropicalism or Negritude) (Chari 2019; Gilroy 1993). These connections are instead well recognised in the vibrant field of geopoetics, which considers postcolonial and decolonial entanglements of subaltern spaces and pays attention to cradles of Negritude such as the Caribbean (Glissant 1990; Last 2017). Since the beginnings, colonial matters have been key to geographical concerns with

<footnote n="4">⁴ FMS-MCA, Entrevista.</footnote>
poetry (Eshun and Madge, 2012) and current geo poetics increasingly engage with decoloniality and
cases from the ‘Souths’ (Nassar 2021; Ferretti 2020), as well as with multi-sensory research
associated with environmental and social concerns (Paiva 2000; Magrane et al. 2020; Cresswell
2022). Recently, Daniel Paiva has suggested to pay attention to Tenreiro’s ‘artistic creation’ to
understand his works and ‘multiscalar outlook’ at colonial societies (Paiva 2022). This works goes
further in arguing for the political nature of Tenreiro’s geo poetic strategy, also understood as a way
to circumvent censorship and political repression.

I apply the same methodological principles as for literary Negritude. While most of the classical
works on Portuguese-speaking African literature are organised around ‘national’ chapters addressing
‘what might be called a national literature’ (Chabal 1996, 1), I rather insist on the transnationality of
these networks (Reza 2024), especially in the pre-independences phase, the most interesting as for
prefiguration politics. Here, I match recent scholarship considering literature as a privileged entry
point to understand ‘intra colonialism’ (Santos 2025, 14), exposing the contradictions of anticolonial
national building, which some authors deemed almost an oxymoron given the colonial origin of the
very idea of nation (Dirlik 2002). Hence, the postcolonial impression that the ‘oppressor seems to
come from within’ (Santos 2025, 7) even if this oppressor is no longer the European invader.
Paradoxically, as several authors noted, a drive for Negritude transnationalism were colonial
languages, now ‘as much African as they are European’ (Hamilton 1991, 330), having been
‘appropriated by Africans’ (Chabal 1996, 6) as veritable war trophies, like in the case of Portuguese.

In the first part, I discuss the origins of Negritude and of antiracist and anticolonial politics in Portugal, including the 1919-1927 experience of Mário Domingues and anarcho-syndicalist journal *A Batalha*. In the second part, I analyse the transnational networks and output of Lusophone Negritude. In the third part, I focus on Tenreiro’s distant and diasporic geo poetics.

The anarchist roots of Lusophone Black insurgence

Class and race battles

Portuguese and European societies are increasingly aware of their Black histories and of the pervasiveness of racism (Kilomba 2019; The Black Mediterranean Collective 2021). Concurrently, scholars call to foster anti-racist geographies (Esson and Last 2020; Puttick and Murrey 2020), to

F. Ferretti, 2025: “Geopoetics of distance: the anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic negritude”, **Geoforum**, 163, 104317, [10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317)
acknowledge the pluralities of Black spatial practices (Bledsoe and Wright 2019), to address
geopolitics of decolonisation (Ferraz de Oliveira 2024) and to overtake Anglo hegemonies within
Black Studies (Hawthorne and Lewis 2023). Yet, several alternative political and intellectual
traditions remain neglected. Only recently Portuguese and international scholarship paid some
interest to the circuits of *A Batalha*, the anarcho-syndicalist newspaper founded in 1919, which came
to sell 40,000 copies as anarchism was majoritarian among Portuguese working classes until the 1926
coup d'état that opened the way to the regime of Salazar, who transformed Portugal in a fascist state
and violently repressed all social opposition (Garcia 2022). This prominent position of anarchism in
the Iberian World until the mid-twentieth century allows understanding the importance of works by
Mário Domingues and other anarchists sensitive to the 'colour line' such as José Ferreira de Castro
(1898-1974) (Pereira 2023). According to Richard Cleminson, *A Batalha* and Domingues were full
part of the early circuits of Black internationalism, providing 'an alternative to both nation-centred
and Marxist-oriented programmes of anticolonialism' (Cleminson 2019, 441) in the context of an
early 'Black Lisbon' that still needs to be further studied.

Ideas that anticolonialism does not equate with nationalism have been key to the anarchist
participation in anticolonial movements worldwide (Anderson 2007; Hirsch and Van der Walt 2010).
Anarchists like Domingues proposed models that differed from the nation-state that would finally
prevail in decolonisation (Getachew 2019), such as federalism and internationalist solidarity,
sometimes associated with Pan-Africanism. Beyond 'metropolitan' Portugal, *A Batalha* counted on
correspondents' networks from the colonies denouncing colonial crimes and endeavours such as the
'Nyassa Company' (Domingues 2022, 190; *A Batalha* 16 July 1922) in Mozambique, where the
newspaper 'was widely read' (Cleminson 2019, 447). *A Batalha* also promoted 'transnational
anticolonial activism' (Cleminson 2022, 448), giving space to Indian and Moroccan anti-colonialists
among others. One of the main originalities of Domingues's approach was 'a fusion of "race-based"
concerns and "class-based" strategies' (Cleminson 2019, 459), considering racism, imperialism and
capitalism as strictly interconnected. He namely advocated for alliances from below between
economically exploited and racially oppressed subjects in both Europe and the colonies.

Recently, José Luis Garcia has republished 63 of the numerous texts attributed to Domingues from
1922 to 1927, stressing the originality of these contributions, which were mostly forgotten in the
middle of the twentieth century due to Fascism on the one side and Stalinism on the other. Original

F. Ferretti, 2025: “Geopoetics of distance: the anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic
negritude”, **Geoforum**, 163, 104317, [10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317)
texts show how clearly Domingues identified links between racism and colonialism. This latter was
defined by Domingues as ‘crime’, to deconstruct the irenic views of official Portuguese propaganda
which depicted his land of origin, São Tomé e Príncipe, as ‘the Pearl of the Atlantic’, while it was one
of the places where ‘the most atrocious barbarities’ (Domingues 2022, 90; *A Batalha* 9 September
1919) were committed by the colonialists. Thus, what anarchists like Domingues wanted was ‘the
complete destruction of private property and the absolute abolition of race prejudices’ (Domingues
2022, 103; *A Batalha*, 4 May 1921). Especially interested in Du Bois’s initiatives such as ‘the Pan-
African meeting in London’ (Domingues 2022, 128; *A Batalha* 1 October 2021), Domingues argued
that Black internationalism should not ‘excite the hatred of the Blacks against the Whites, of brothers
against brothers, but realise a universal justice in which there is room for Black, White, Red and
Yellow people’ (Domingues 2022, 142; *A Batalha* 1 July 1922). This stance was intrinsically anti-
patriotic and antimilitarist, rejecting the incorporation of African troops for either European or
colonial wars given that ‘wanting Black people to serve the Portuguese [or any other European]
Fatherland means compelling the tyrannised to kiss the tyrant, the robbed to embrace the robber’
(Domingues 2022, 180; *A Batalha* 13 July 1922). Thus, it was necessary to avoid that ‘White slaves
and Black slaves kill each other [as draftees] to the profit of capitalist states and bourgeois powers’
(Domingues 2022, 217; *A Batalha* 12 December 1922).

As anarchist political strategies do not include the idea of vanguard parties, Domingues argued that independence should take the form that oppressed people wanted in each place: ‘Freedom should not be conceded, but conquered. Shall Black people conquer it by themselves’ (Domingues 2022, 154; *A Batalha* 5 July 1922). Domingues’s prediction of future decolonisation anticipated what happened in the following decades: ‘The periodical revolts that took place here and there are nothing but the announcement of an immense revolution that will destroy … all colonial powers’ (Domingues 2022, 181; *A Batalha* 13 July 1922). Yet, Domingues could not foresee the Cold War, which pushed ‘constitutional’ decolonisation (Craggs and Neate 2024) very far from internationalist and egalitarian expectations.

Domingues identified himself as ‘um mulato muito escuro, quase preto’ [a very dark Mixed-Race person, almost Black] in the dreadful racial hierarchies that miscegenation had created and which, far from Luso-tropicalist myths, served to foster discrimination rather than integration. Against that, Domingues stated that he ‘was not ashamed: on the contrary [he] was proud of [his] colour’

F. Ferretti, 2025: “Geopoetics of distance: the anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic negritude”, **Geoforum**, 163, 104317, [10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317)
(Domingues 2022, 243; *A Batalha* 21 September 1924). Domingues and friends also expressed racial matters through novels such as *O Preto de Charleston* [The Black of Charleston] (1929), *O Menino entre Gigantes* [The Child and the Giants] (1960) by Domingues and * Sangue Negro* [Black Blood] (1923) by Domingues's *Batalha* colleague Ferreira de Castro, depicting the daily racist discrimination that Black and Mixed-Race people suffered in Lisbon (Pereira 2023).

During Salazar’s dictatorship, Domingues had to forcibly abandon publicly displayed political engagement. He became a writer of adventure novels for which he was nicknamed ‘the Portuguese Emilio Salgari’ (Garcia 2022, 28), to later confirm his anarchist convictions at the end of the regime by resuming collaboration with anarchist journals such as *A Voz Anarquista* in 1974 (Garcia 2022). Domingues’s anti-racist work was well known by leftist activists of the following generation such as Alfredo Margarido<fnref n="5" /> and Noémia de Sousa. He had direct connections with the CEA group through his son António, who took some distances from anarchism getting closer to the Communist Party, and mainly with another amazing figure of dissident, Andrade (1997).

## Domingues and Andrade’s bridging generations

Born in Golungo-Alto (Angola) in 1928 and a native Kimbundu speaker, Andrade went to Lisbon in 1948 for his university studies. There, he got acquainted with all future leaders of CONCP (Conferência das Organizações Nacionalistas das Colónias Portuguesas) anticolonial organisations (Ferretti 2021; Tornimbeni 2023) including Cabral, Neto, Lúcio Lara, Viriato da Cruz, Aquino de Bragança and Marcelino dos Santos (Andrade 1997). Andrade lived a transnational, multilingual and adventurous life across diasporic places such as Luanda, Lisbon, Paris, Conakry, Brazzaville, Algiers, Casablanca, Bissau, Maputo and London (Mata and Padilha 2000). A key exponent of the ‘Cabral generation’ trained in the *Casa dos Estudantes do Império* (CEI), Andrade sought sanctuary in Paris in 1954 as he started to be known by PIDE. In the French capital he was equally watched by the local police as they systematically did with Black foreign students even before they manifested any political intention.<fnref n="6" /> There, Andrade became the main collaborator of Franco-Senegalese writer Alioune Diop, who managed the journal and publishing house *Présence Africaine*, then the world centre of Negritude (Reza 2024).

<footnote n="5">⁵ FMS-MPA, A. Margarido, A experiencia de um mulato muito escuro, quase preto, em Lisboa, *Cabo Verde, Boletim de Propaganda e informação*, XII, 43, 1961, 04355.007.003.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ Paris, Archives de la Préfecture de Police, Dossier Mário Pinto de Andrade, 77 W 5482 660159.</footnote>
As a cultural organiser, Andrade was acquainted with the Gotha of Black and anticolonial thought such as Césaire, Du Bois, Senghor, Cheikh Anta Diop, Richard Wright, Réné Depestre, French dissidents such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Daniel Guérin, and Brazilians such as Florestan Fernandes. As a student in Paris, he attended the *École Pratique des Hautes Études* where he was mentored by nonconformist academics such as Roger Bastide and Georges Gurvitch (Ferretti 2022). Andrade has been considered as an ‘eternal dissident’ (Pereira 2000, 45) who was always ‘in revolt against the discipline’ (Parreira 2000, 176), either of the academia, of the Party or of his employers. Andrade eventually broke with MPLA and with its new leader Neto, rejecting this latter’s alignment with the Soviet Union (Lopes 2000) and joining the dissident tendence *Revolta Activa* (Pimenta 2006). Exiled again after Angola’s independence, Andrade contributed to the decolonisation of Guinea-Bissau, where he worked from 1975 to 1980, when a coup d’état ousting Amilcar’s brother Luís Cabral compelled him to further exile.

Involved in several projects of ‘Re-Africanisation’, including books of African fables for ‘European and African children’<fnref n="7" /> with António Domingues’s drawings and Tenreiro’s texts, Andrade requested the collaboration of Mário Domingues for Negritude agendas. The São-Tomean anarchist supplied a text, ‘The poetic message of Black people’, that Andrade would translate and read in Paris at the 1956 First Congress of Black Artists and Writers that he co-organised with Alioune Diop (Pereira 2023). Domingues’s original manuscript survives in Andrade’s archives and shows how geo-poetics of anti-colonialists of the new generation were in line with the story told so far, as Domingues strongly endorsed the new movement, especially its multilingualism and cosmopolitanism, and tried to give some advice. Anticipating the scholarship mentioned above, Domingues deemed Negritude ‘Black poetry in European languages’<fnref n="8" /> and contended that, using Portuguese, ‘French, English, Spanish, poets are always spiritually Black, as they had a common African language’.<fnref n="9" /> Although contributing to this setup, Andrade stressed later the need of also using original African languages ‘matching works of Cheikh Anta Diop’<fnref n="10" /> another Senegalese writer and political dissident.

<footnote n="7">⁷ FMS-MPA, O Homem e o Cágado, 04354.005.012.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ FMS-MPA, Mário Domingues, A mensagem poética dos negros, 04354.005.004.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ FMS-MPA, A mensagem poética dos negros.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ FMS-MPA, M. Pinto de Andrade, Poesia Negro-Africana, 04355.007.006.</footnote>
Most importantly, Domingues was sarcastic on the matters of style that literary critics raised on commenting Negritude poetry, initially considered as close to surrealism: 'They are not Surrealists: they are Blacks'.<fnref n="11" /> For Domingues, formal analyses were matters for White people, as Black poetry came from 'a cry of suffering, an uprise of revolt', whose favourite theme was injustice from whatever region of the world it originated. While confirming that this struggle had to be 'racial and not racist', Domingues contended that 'the best French poetry [wa]s Black'.<fnref n="12" /> Portuguese-speaking Negritude was still less known internationally, although Domingues could foresee the future renown of 'Neto, from Angola... Alda do Espírito Santo, from São Tomé', while already 'relatively well-known Francisco Tenreiro' was significantly defined by Domingues as a São-Tomean rather than a Portuguese. Likewise appreciating Viriato da Cruz, Domingues indicated as his favourite author Noémia de Sousa, 'still almost unknown', for 'the magic of the images that bring us to her world. This magic is the secret of the veritable poet ... doubly symbolic as it is both “poetic” and “black”, in the most wonderful and vivid sense'.<fnref n="13" /> Amazingly, Domingues's programme fairly matched the agenda expressed by Tenreiro and Andrade in PNP, tracing a symbolic wire between two generations as I detail in the next section.

## Lusophone Negritude

### *Places and contexts in the circulation of anticolonial cultures*

Alexandra Reza has recently investigated a sample of journals showing the 'multilingual and spatial overlaps between the struggles against French and Portuguese colonialisms, and the place of creative work as part of the anticolonial struggle' (Reza 2024, 203). Lusophone Negritude geo poetics was one of the aspects of that little-explored field. It is worth noting that the first intellectual model that inspired Tenreiro and Andrade in conceiving PNP was Senghor's *Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française*, first published in 1948 and famously preceded by Sartre's *Orphée noir*. Ironically, between Sartre and Senghor, it was the Senegalese who most wanted to keep Black poetry in the tradition of 'humanism' (Senghor 1985, 1), choosing for publication the anniversary of 1848, eventually the revolution that inaugurated the Second Republic and definitively allowed the abolition of chattel slavery in French colonies. Conversely, Sartre appeared as more

<footnote n="11">¹¹ FMS-MPA, A mensagem poética dos negros.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² FMS-MPA, A mensagem poética dos negros.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ FMS-MPA, A mensagem poética dos negros.</footnote>
radical in demasking ‘white privilege’ (Sartre 1985, ix) and provincializing the position of France and Europe as an ‘accident of geography’ (Sartre 1985, x).

Sartre defined quite clearly the political role of Negritude, which he deemed the ‘sole great revolutionary poetry’ (Sartre 1985, xii) standing ‘against Europe and colonisation’ (Sartre 1985, xxvii) with special reference to works of Césaire and the other Black authors whose poems were anthologised. Yet, Sartre still tried to make Negritude compatible with his own Marxism by incorporating it in ‘dialectics’ (Sartre 1985, xliii). These attempts would fail in the following years with the rupture between the *Rassemblement Démocratique Africain* and the French Communist Party, and Césaire’s 1956 resignment from this Party due to its collaboration with the French Government in the Algerian War. The proofs of the writing through which Césaire exposed his views (Césaire 1956) were corrected ‘together’ (Andrade and Messiant 1999, 208) by Césaire and Andrade, then working at *Présence Africaine*. As for Andrade, he claimed to have always refused any Party or ideologic orthodoxy (Andrade and Messiant 1999; Andrade 1997) and recollected how, like most CEI activists, he ‘did not much militate in Portuguese parties’,<fnref n="14" /> giving priority to anticolonial work. The diasporic places and international networks in which Lusophone Negritude unfolded allow understanding its impact in the following struggles.

The first place to consider is the CEI, an institution that was founded in 1945 by the Salazar regime to host, and arguably control, the increasingly numerous students that came from overseas colonies, being closed in 1965 once it was clear that the transnational circulation of anticolonial ideas was no longer susceptible of control (Castelo and Jerónimo 2017). Initially populated by members of the White elites settled in the Colonies, the CEI saw the growing presence of Black and Mixed-Race students who started anticolonial networking through journals such as *Msgagem* (Reza 2024) and connections with proletarians such as the seafarers who served as ‘messengers’<fnref n="15" /> to circulate information from Lisbon to the other ports of the Empire. The CEI became a recognized ‘school’ of ‘anticolonial consciousness’ (Martins 2017, 203) in which poetic works such as PNP were a key part of students’ political conscientisation (Ramalho 2017). These links of transnational insurgence are key to understand how nationalism remained ‘insufficient to the greater goal of a wider freedom’ (Reza 2016, 38) and to understand the dynamics of these cosmopolitan movements.

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ FMS-MPA, Entrevista.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ FMS-MPA, Entrevista.</footnote>
While the most famous activists and future leaders who attended the CEI were Cabral and Neto (Chabal 2003), scholars recognize the key role of Tenreiro as the ‘promoter’ (Faria and Boavida 2017) of the *Centro de Estudos Africanos*. Being dangerous organising meetings in the CEI, the CEA group gathered discreetly in the house of ‘Tia Andreza’, an aunt of Alda do Espírito Santo. In his recollections, Andrade defined Tenreiro as ‘the centre of the Centre’<fnref n="16" /> given that he was elder and more scholarly experienced than the other members. Andrade and Tenreiro namely redacted the earliest programme of the CEA after ‘conversations’ with Neto, Cabral and António Domingues. For Andrade, this semi-clandestine dimension well indicated how their interests were not limited to ‘geography, linguistics or history of colonisation’,<fnref n="17" /> on which public conferences were organised, the first being pronounced by Tenreiro on African geographies. This diasporic group was even defined as an ‘embryo’ (Ferreira 1982, 20) of the future anticolonial organisations of Lusophone Africa.

Importantly, poetic output such as PNP did not immediately attract PIDE's attention, unlike the denunciation of the 1953 colonial massacres in São Tomé that Andrade published in *Présence Africaine* (Fele 1955b). Then, Neto was imprisoned, the CEA ceased its activities and Andrade had to move to Paris in 1954. Historian Alfredo Margarido wonders on the reasons of this initial 'passivity of [PIDE] specialists of repression' and humorously hypothesizes that this was mainly due to their ignorance and racial prejudices: 'Uncultured as they were, they may have considered literary production as a childish amusement, when it was made by Africans' (Margarido 1994, 15). Yet, this amusement had serious political implications, as I discuss below.

## A key booklet

Meanwhile, PNP was printed, containing nine poems from the authors mentioned above. Andrade recollected that his own copy of Senghor's *Anthologie* had 'passed from hand to hand'.<fnref n="18" /> PNP was 'a collective contribution of the CEA [as] all main protagonists of the Centre' collaborated to it. According to Manuel Ferreira, this Lusophone expression of Negritude was rather political than exclusively racial, as one of the authors, António Jacinto, 'was a White Angolan' (Ferreira 1982, 26). Indeed, in his Introduction, Andrade gave a very cosmopolite definition of what he understood as

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ FMS-MPA, Entrevista.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ FMS-MPA, Entrevista.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ FMS-MPA, Entrevista.</footnote>
‘Black Poetry’, that was ‘not only produced by Black people coming from Africa, but also from the Americas. It rises now as the ripe fruit of a new consciousness of African problems, elaborated with the technical help of Europe’s cultural traditions’ (PNP, 1). Culturally, it was a plural dialogue that they sought.

While concepts such as epistemic decolonisation were not yet discussed, Andrade was aware of the work of cultural ‘destruction’ that European colonialism operated since the fiftieth century by ‘de-tribalizing people, denying their cultural values, disorganising indigenous forces’ (PNP, 1). This included racial hierarchies in which Black *assimilados* (‘unrooted’ for Andrade) who embraced European culture had much more chances of social insertion than their ‘tribal’ fellows. Thus, the first way to get rid of ‘colonial alienation’ was ‘a just and equilibrated dialogue between Africa and Europe’. Noteworthy, this was not an irenic exercise of appeasement, as Andrade cited a poem by Césaire carrying the revealing title of ‘Débout maintenant’ (Standing Up Now) (PNP, 1). Césaire referred to his ‘country’, inspiring references to one’s native land that were very frequent in Negritude geopoetics, often through the evocation of maternal figures, like in Tenreiro’s case.

Yet, this attachment to land was put in tension with universalistic ambitions to address what Tenreiro had already called ‘*Negro de todo o mundo*’ [Worldwide Black] (PNP, 2). Beyond some cultural influences of French universalism, this was also the effect of the transnational and multilingual setup of the diasporic experiences that these poets and activists shared. For instance, Andrade reproduced two sestets of Césaire’s poem in the original French, while the first poem of the collection, ‘*Son numero 6*’ by Nicolás Guillén, was reproduced in the original Spanish. Guillén’s text expressed the same anguished diasporic spatialities that characterised the experience of most CEA poets dreaming of faraway Africa: ‘*Yoruba soy, lloro en yoruba lucumi/Como soy un Yoruba de Cuba/quiero que hasta Cuba suba mi llanto yoruba/que suba el alegre llanto Yoruba que sale de mi*’ (PNP, 4).<fnref n="19" /> Claiming Yoruba identity indicated the depth of the African roots that were perceived in Black Caribbean poetry despite the violence of the Middle Passage and of centuries of slavery and cultural repression. Yet, this poetry was far from proposing ‘pure’ racial or cultural models.

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ I am a Yoruba, I cry in Yoruba Lucumi/As I am a Yoruba from Cuba/I want that my Yoruba song comes to Cuba/comes this happy Yoruba song which is my own.</footnote>
In this vein, Guillén made explicit references to mixed ancestry as insurgent identity, which contrasted ideas that it was a step towards assimilation, quite widespread in South America. ‘*Salga el mulato/suelte el zapato/dígale al blanco que no se va/de aquí no hay nadie que se separe ... que el son de todos no va parar*’ (PNP, 5).<fnref n="20" /> Miscegenation, distance and anguish were also the themes of Tenreiro’s ‘*Coração em África*’, dedicated to the poet’s native island that he still had to visit. ‘*Caminhos trilhados na Europa/de coração em África/saudades longas de palmeiras vermelhas, verdes amarelas*’ (PNP, 10).<fnref n="21" /> Tenreiro had not yet seen those palms, which highlighted his sense of exile and double consciousness even in his condition of relatively ‘privileged’ Mixed-Race Portuguese citizen, for which Europe was the land of marked professional pathways and Africa the land of the hearth.

Indeed, Lusophone Negritude was much more than poetry on/of Blackness, including mixed identities and voluntaristic willingness to join the struggle. This was the case with White anticolonial activist Jacinto, whose poem ‘*Monangamba*’ denounced the exploitation of Black workers in Angolan coffee plantations, comparing the landscape and the colours of the harvest with the suffering bodies of workers: ‘*Naquela roça grande não tem chuva/é o suor do meu rosto que rega as plantações/Naquela roça grande tem café maduro e aquele vermelho/cereja/são gotas de meu sangre feitas seva/O café vai ser torrado, pisado, torturado/vai ficar negro, negro da cor do contratado*’ (PNP, 9).<fnref n="22" /> Themes of universal Blackness were explicitly evoked in Tenreiro’s poem through mentions to Black movements in North America, France and the Caribbean, including the story of Willie McGee ‘*cidadão negro e da negritude*’,<fnref n="23" /> victim of the electric chair in 1951.

Likewise, Neto’s poem ‘*Com olhos secos*’ [With Dry Eyes] expressed a sadness that went ‘from Congo, to Georgia, to Amazonas’ (PNP, 6) expressed by the victims of the same racial and capitalist oppression. Similar shifts between local and universal geographies of Blackness characterised the works of Viriato da Cruz, whose ‘*Mamã Negra*’ [Black Mum] started by the evocation of the mother to convene Black voices from the plantations of ‘the Carolinas/Alabama/Cuba/Brazil/ ... Harlem’

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Come out, *mulato*/drop your shoe/tell the White man that you are not leaving/no one can leave here ... shall everybody's song not stop.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Travelled pathways in Europe/With the hearth in Africa/long nostalgias of red, green and yellow palms.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² In that large field there is no rain/it is the sweat of my face that waters the plantations/In that large field there is ripe coffee and that red-cherry seeds/are drops of my blood made into seva/The coffee will be roasted, crushed, tortured/it will turn black, black like the colour of the worker.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ Black and Negritude citizen.</footnote>
(PNP, 16). There, fighters 'fell with Lynch' to 'resuscitate with Zumbi<fnref n="24" /> [and] revolt with Toussaint'<fnref n="25" />, drawing a universal historical geo-poetics of Black insurgence from all sides of the Ocean. Significantly, in his postface to PNP, Tenreiro claimed that Negritude 'put aside political factions and evil patriotisms' and, while singing in different languages and rooted in different places, 'Black poets mutually understand and are understood ... by those who can read ... the great human symphony ... beyond all regional and formal matters' (PNP, 18), which matched Domingues's arguments discussed above.

A similar local/global tension characterised two influential women of Lusophone Negritude who published in PNP, showing the little-studied but significant female agency in CEI circuits despite widespread historiographic celebrations of male leaders (Falconi 2024): São Tomean Alda do Espírito Santo and Mozambican Noémia de Sousa. In her poem 'Lá no Agua Grande', Espírito Santo contrasted a scene of children swimming in a river with the brutality of the call to return to the plantation. This shift from happy songs to sudden silence had the effect of turning the idyllic tropical landscape of colonialist propaganda in the disciplined space of racial capitalism. In her poem 'Magaíça' [The transborder Mozambican worker employed in South African mines], Sousa presented the train station as the transitional place in which migrant workers brought 'os restos da falsa civilização do compound do Rand' (PNP, 13).<fnref n="26" /> Again, it was from transnational experiences that her people could hear the songs of 'Harlem Black spirituals', to conclude: 'Deixa passar meu povo' (PNP, 14).<fnref n="27" /> Compelled to flee from Mozambique in 1951 as she was already involved in leftist activities and her partner had been arrested (Alfieri 2019), Sousa was the Portuguese translator of Césaire's *Discours sur le colonialisme* with a preface by Andrade (Flaherty-Echeverria 2015), being for some years a protagonist of this movement, in touch with Mário Domingues and 'at the heart of the clandestine activities that took place in Lisbon and elsewhere' (Falconi 2024, 1411).

Explicit social denunciation prefigurating 'decolonial critique' also characterized poems by Espírito Santo, who would be active in future independent São Tomé, and her fellow citizen Manuela Margarido (Bamgbose 2024). Espírito Santo was also among the first authors who rescued her island's insurgent histories through poems such as 'O ciclo do Amador', dedicated to the mythic figure

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Zumbi, the mythic leader of the Quilombo of Palmares in Brazil.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ Toussaint Louverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ The remains of the false civilisation of the Rund compound.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Let my people go (also in English in the original).</footnote>
of Amador, a sort of São Tomean Zumbi who led a slave revolt in 1595 whose survivors were at the origin of the many-centuried epopee of quilombos and resistant spatialities in the remote Southern region of the island (Margarido and Castro Henriques 2010). Yet, Negritude geo poetics represented an era of pioneering hopes that were first confronted to the need of armed struggle, and then to the postcolonial disappointment for the outcomes of constitutional independence, which first affected former French and British colonies in Africa. These matters were discussed by Andrade in the rich anthologies of African Lusophone poetry that he edited in the following years, including a 1961 Italian collection titled *Black literature* and prefaced by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Confirming the importance of a transnational setup to understand decolonisation, the Italian poet highlighted the ‘flavour of resistance’ (Pasolini 1961, xv) that these verses from the entire Black world (Africa and the Americas) contained. In an anthology that Andrade published in French in 1969, following a former edition in Portuguese printed in Paris (Andrade 1958), the Angolan activist stressed how newly independent African countries were ‘far from achieving freedom after acquiring sovereignty’ (Andrade 1969, 7). New hopes remained about Portuguese colonies still struggling for independence, a cause for which, according to Andrade, poetry had been instrumental in fostering a transnational consciousness countering the opposed nationalisms that were an invention of the colonisers. Far from exoticism and committed to people’s ‘daily concerns’ (Andrade 1969, 23), this new poetry introduced ‘the rhythm of African languages in the very structure of Portuguese language’ (Andrade 1969, 30). Yet, times had already changed, and this was no longer sufficient.

Armed struggle had started in the 1960s and several African Lusophone poets were singing behind the bars of their prisons, like in the case of Cape Verdean Mário Fonseca, or in the infamous concentration camp of Tarrafal in the case of Angolan Luandino Vieira. Themes of universal Blackness were declined in less festive and more fighting tones in Espírito Santo’s poems for the victims of the 1953 Batepá massacre, represented as raising together from their common grave to claim for vengeance and for ‘a chainless world in which freedom will be the sole homeland’ (Andrade 1969, 67). It was no longer in student houses, but in the bushes and ‘mine fields, among ambushes and under a sky of NATO bombs [that] the people re[took] their rights to poetic creation’ (Andrade 1969, 145). In his successive anthologies, carrying very telling titles such as *Na noite grávida de punhais* [In the night pregnant with daggers] and *O canto armado* [The armed song] and illustrated by António Domingues, Andrade further clarified these notions.

F. Ferretti, 2025: “Geopoetics of distance: the anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic negritude”, **Geoforum**, 163, 104317, [10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317)
The Angolan intellectual especially proposed a periodisation of African Lusophone poetry in three phases, of which Negritude was just the first one. Still characterised by some elitism that the author reproached to groups such as Cabo Verdean *Claridade* journal (Andrade 1975, 5), this phase had limits such as ‘small audiences and almost exclusive use of the coloniser’s language’ (Andrade 1975, 10). Yet, Negritude had the crucial merit of ‘setting the ... impatient postulate of fraternity’ (Andrade 1975, 7). The second phase, that Andrade identified with the 1953-1960 period, corresponded to ‘particularisation’ (Andrade 1975, 9), shifting from the initial cosmopolite circulation of poems to the creation of national groups. The third one started with the armed struggles in 1961, when ‘bullets started to flourish’ (Andrade 1975, 9). Thus, it was no longer time for erudite production, but for poetry targeting popular communication, which started to include local languages in the autonomous regions controlled by guerrillas in Guiné-Bissau and elsewhere: ‘Guerrilla poetry’ (Andrade 1979, 10).

Meanwhile, divergences emerged among the exponents of the ‘Cabral generation’ (Mata 2010, 10), including geographer Tenreiro whose trajectory is still controversial in current literature, although I would contend that it was fairly consistent with the aforementioned periodisation proposed by his life-long friend Andrade, as I discuss in the next session.

## Distant geo-poetics and contested outcomes

### What is an anti-colonialist?

Today, in São Tomé e Príncipe, Tenreiro is considered as a sort of ‘Noble Father’ of the Independence, one to whom statues, buildings and even a banknote have been dedicated. In 2024, a celebrative photographic exposition took place in the Tenreiro National Library in São Tomé with the collaboration of the Centre for Geographical Studies of the University of Lisbon (Oliveira 2024). Yet, Tenreiro’s legacies are quite controversial, and the substantial collective volume edited by Inocência Mata in 2010 to investigate the ‘multiple sides’ of this intellectual contains quite opposite views on whether Tenreiro should effectively be considered as an anti-colonialist. On the one extreme, Gerhard Seibert argues that Tenreiro’s work was instrumental to the Empire and that, ‘if Tenreiro was a convicted patriot, his *patria* was Portugal’ (Seibert 2010, 136). Seibert’s analysis is based on two main points. The first, the most known of Tenreiro’s works that are considered as canonised

F. Ferretti, 2025: “Geopoetics of distance: the anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic negritude”, *Geoforum*, 163, 104317, 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317
‘geography’, *A Ilha de São Tomé* (Tenreiro 1961), was redacted under the influence of Ribeiro and the French tradition of regional and national monographs. For Seibert, this work undermined the insurgent histories of revolt in the island, adopting the canons of Luso-tropicalism that were accepted within Portuguese imperial discourses (Seibert 2013). Seibert concedes that this was accordingly an effect of ‘censorship’ (Seibert 2020, 128), as it would have been impossible to publish ‘subversive’ content in a book founded by the colonial *Junta de Investigações do Ultramar*. Yet, at a first reading of the original text it appears clear that Tenreiro was far from ignoring slaves’ revolts, abolitionism and quilombos, which he mentioned in numerous pages although in cautious tones (Tenreiro 1961, 63, 71-73, 75, 79-80, etc.).

Seibert’s second point touches another puzzling matter. That is, in 1958, when his former CEI comrades ‘Cabral and Neto founded the Anti-colonial movement (MAC), Tenreiro became Member of Parliament for the *União Nacional*, then the only legal party, for the deputation of São Tomé e Príncipe in the Salazarist National Assembly’. He was then ‘the sole “Black” among the 120 congressmen’ (Seibert 2013), given that the representatives of the other colonies were all White settlers. For Seibert, in making this choice Tenreiro was misled by ‘the liberalising promises of Marcelo Caetano’ (Seibert 2010, 135), the same man who will be destituted by the 1974 Carnation Revolution, which also put an end to the Portuguese Empire. Thus, although advocating for ‘the amelioration of the conditions of native populations’ (Seibert 2010, 135), Tenreiro legitimised the colonial regime and never questioned it in his institutional functions—which he would not have been allowed doing, however. Conversely, Seibert notes that, when Cabral denounced the names of several African-born ‘collaborationists’ of the regime, Tenreiro’s name ‘did not appear’ (Seibert 2010, 136).

Some authors join Seibert’s views although explaining Tenreiro’s trajectories through some move back in relation to his former anticolonial positions (Rocha 2010). On the other side, Angolan geographer and Tenreiro’s student Ilídio de Amaral stresses how Tenreiro, even making the obliged choice of representing the detested *União Nacional*, remained part of their circle of African friends: people who were ‘independent, consciousness of citizenship and thirsty with justice and equality of rights’ (Amaral 2010, 39). Amaral notes that, at the moment of his premature and sudden death in 1963, Tenreiro (arguably under governmental pressure) was about to move from Lisbon to Luanda for taking a position in the local Ministry of Education, which makes wonder on how he would have behaved in relation to the Angolan war of liberation in the following years. While any hypotheses

F. Ferretti, 2025: “Geopoetics of distance: the anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic negritude”, **Geoforum**, 163, 104317, [10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317)
would be counterfactual, authors such as São Tomean Albertino Bragança stress how, until his late
days, Tenreiro continued to write poems of ‘Negritude’ (Bragança 2010, 54) containing anticolonial
themes, including an unpublished poem ‘dedicated to recently assassinated Patrice Lumumba’
(Laranjeira 2010, 185) found in Tenreiro’s personal archives by scholar Pires Laranjeira. This latter
argues that, in his political work, Tenreiro avoided ‘all indignities’, saving ‘a certain integrity’
(Laranjeira 2010, 185). According to African friends’ recollections, ‘he maintained the same idea until
his death’ in relation to ‘fascism and colonialism’ (Laranjeira 1985, 427). Importantly, recent
scholarship highlights the potential of the ‘anticolonial seeds’ (Ferreira 2024, 136) that can be found
in Tenreiro’s poetry.

Here, I would contend that it is problematic to assume too moralising tones in relation to the behaviour
of people who lived and worked in very constraining situations, and that Tenreiro’s premature death
in a quite early moment in the history of Lusophone Africa’s independences would render
anachronistic any definitive political label. Yet, some points can be made. As noted above, both rigid
disciplinary separations between Negritude ‘poetry’ and canonised ‘geography’, and the reduction of
anticolonialism to mere national independence, present limitations. It also seems that most authors
who discussed Tenreiro’s political attitudes did not systematically analyse Tenreiro’s materials in
Andrade’s archives and the reports concerning Tenreiro in the PIDE folders currently available at the
National Archives. Of course, police sources should be handled with special caution as they often
exaggerate facts and express highly biased judgements. Yet, these sources are widely used in the
history of political movements as they contain documentation on factual matters and can mainly help
understanding how a political regime perceives certain behaviours and people, given the zeal of the
reports’ redactors in trying to please the government in charge while profiling ‘subversives’.

Before discussing these sources, it is worth noting that, in the recollections of Tenreiro’s closest CEA
friend, far from any suspect of condescendence, Andrade, the geographer was never depicted as
someone who changed his ideas, but always as a friend of anticolonial causes. This provides important
elements to contextualise Tenreiro’s antiracist and anticolonial commitment: for Andrade, already in
the CEA years, they carried out cultural activities led by Tenreiro who was ‘the elder member of the
group, and let’s say our advisor’, alongside ‘more clandestine’ activities outside the CEA involving
Andrade, ‘Neto and Cabral’.<fnref n="28" /> From this further ‘layer’ of political activities Tenreiro had been

<footnote n="28">²⁸ FMS-MCA, Entrevista.</footnote>
deliberately excluded by his younger mates, because he was ‘a man of science ... an established man, he had a family’ (Andrade 1997, 81). Thus, they estimated that it was not worth exposing Tenreiro to the risk of an arrestation as he was ‘with us with his hearth’ and ‘what he did was very important for the future of Africa’ (Andrade 1997, 95). The fact that Andrade constantly repeated this kind of judgements decades after Tenreiro’s death shows how Tenreiro’s contribution was praised in anticolonial milieus even if, since the beginning, it was limited to intellectual work rather than frontal confrontation with the coloniser.

However, materials surviving in both Andrade's and PIDE's archives show that, in the 1940s, before meeting African anti-colonialists, young Tenreiro had militated in Portuguese MUD-Juvenil (Movimento de Unidade Democrática), a youth platform for leftist opposition that was tolerated but closely watched by the regime. Already noticed in a 1945 police report mentioning 'one Tenreiro, whom we think is one of the leaders of the Anti-Fascist Academic Group',<fnref n="29" /> Tenreiro was a speaker in MUD public meetings alongside future socialist leader Mário Soares, discussing the condition of 'Black youth'<fnref n="30" /> in Portugal. These activities were promptly recorded in PIDE files,<fnref n="31" /> including the intellectuals' petitions for freedom of expression<fnref n="32" /> and the appeals that Tenreiro co-signed against governmental repression at University.<fnref n="33" /> In those years, Tenreiro collaborated with leftist journals such as *Seara Nova*, and in 1947 he published a paper in the ephemeral *Mundo Literário*, a literary review edited by leftist intellectuals that was closed by the regime in 1948. In papers such as '*A poesia do negro José Maria*', Tenreiro showed his solid knowledge of Negritude debates in all the Americas and of the differences in processes of *mestiçagem* and acculturation going on in countries such as Cuba, 'USA, Brazil or Guianas'.<fnref n="34" /> Tenreiro also quoted Freyre among his references, which is significant as he rarely mentioned the Brazilian scholar in his mature works, even criticising him (Tenreiro 1961, 212). Thus, it was voluntarily that Tenreiro did not style Freyre as a main reference for his geography, although Freyre's archives in Recife contain a Tenreiro's postcard accompanying a copy of *A Ilha de São Tomé*.<fnref n="35" /> In a 1950 paper, Tenreiro also showed deep knowledge of the work

<footnote n="29">²⁹ PP/TT/PIDE/D-A/003/04220, Report of 4 May 1945.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ FMS, Fundo Mário Soares (hereafter FMS-MS). MUD-Juvenil 02969.002.013.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ PT/TT/PIDE/D-A/003/04220, MUD-Juvenil Boletim n. 2; Relatório, Sessão do Movimento Juvenil de Unidade democrática, 28/3.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² PT/TT/PIDE/D-A/003/04220, Os intelectuais portugueses protestam, November 1946.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ FMS-MS, Escola do MUD, 02969.012.001.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ FMS-MPA, F. Tenreiro, A poesia do negro José Maria, 04355.009.003.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Recife, Fundação Gilberto Freyre, Correspondentes Estrangeiros, Tenreiro to Freyre, 2 April [1962].</footnote>
of Brazilian intellectual Artur Ramos (1903-1949), one of the earliest anti-racist advocates of Afro-
Brazilian studies.<fnref n="36" />

PIDE folders show that Tenreiro continued to be filed and watched by the political police even in the years in which he served in Parliament. In 1958, a letter from *Présence Africaine* requesting Tenreiro to send a contribution on 'The responsibility of Geography' before the colonial question for the Second International Meeting of Black Writers was seized by the police.<fnref n="37" /> An amazing 1957 report from the São Tomé PIDE delegation expressed preoccupation, during Tenreiro's electoral campaign, for the circulation of '*Coraçao em Africa*' , that they deemed a work 'of Communist attitude,'<fnref n="38" /> whose integral text was sent to PIDE Director-in-Chief in Lisbon for appreciation. We do not know if such reading has intellectually enriched that gentleman, but police reports naming Tenreiro in relation to the publication of Black poetry collections in Portugal and abroad continued until 1963.<fnref n="39" /> In those years, it is ironic to note a paradoxical contrast between two documents: the first one, an anonymous anti-Tenreiro satirical poem surviving in Soares's archives, was arguably written by some African activist disappointed by Tenreiro's choice to represent the *União Nacional* and rhymed scurrilous insults against the geographer, defined as a '*grande filho da...'* [Great son of a ...],<fnref n="40" /> amidst racist and sexist considerations on his Mixed-Race ancestry. This is not surprising as, despite public antiracist claims, racial belonging was always a problem within Lusophone anticolonial organisations as not all Black activists accepted to have White or Mixed-Race people in their groups (Pimenta 2006), and violent internal polemics went well beyond cases such as Tenreiro's.

On the other hand, it was a 1961 PIDE report that involuntarily defended Tenreiro, revealing that even
as a Member of Parliament the political police was still wary of him. For PIDE, Tenreiro did 'not
represent well the ideals of the current regime, because of its connections with Black intellectuals,
clearly favourable to the emancipation of their provinces ... Although he cannot actively participate
due to his political duties, his sympathy is with them'.<fnref n="41" /> Basically, this was the same argument of
Tenreiro's friends defending the coherence of his choices. Thus, I finally contend that, while there is
no just one way to be an anti-colonialist and Tenreiro showed some coherence in representing a

<footnote n="36">³⁶ FMS-MCA, F. Tenreiro, O estudo do negro, 04326.007.001.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ PT/TT/PIDE/D-A/003/04220, Société Africaine de Culture, 1958.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ PT/TT/PIDE/D-A/003/04220, São Tomé e Príncipe, 31 October 1957.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">³⁹ PT/TT/PIDE/D-A/003/04220, 18 September 1963.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ FMS-MS, In Memoriam do Mulato José Tenreiro, 02591.020.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ PT/TT/PIDE/D-A/003/04220, 8 February 1961.</footnote>
‘moderate’ and ‘intellectual’ side of that struggle, it is possible to argue that his veritable contribution to today debates remains his ‘geopoetics, which constitutes now one of the productive directions for literary investigation’ (Sampaio 2022). This applies also to geography, as Tenreiro’s poems give today more direct contributions to critical and decolonial geopoetics than certain descriptive exercises that were (and still are) canonised as ‘academic geography’.

## Diasporic geopoetics as critical geography

It was first the case with *Ilha de Nome Santo*, which introduced the notion of distance from the mother, whom Tenreiro did not yet meet: ‘*Mai! Entre nós, milhas! Entre nós: uma raça! Contudo, este livro é para ti*’ (Tenreiro 1942, 7).<fnref n="42" /> The same distance was evoked about the day of the poet’s birth, expressing this interior trouble and the desire of a better life. ‘*Nasci naquela terra distante/num dia de batuque/Daí esta pressa de viver*’ (Tenreiro 1942, 9).<fnref n="43" /> The social and gendered aspects of colonisation emerged in poems such as ‘*Romance de Sinhá Carlota*’, a Black woman embodying Tenreiro’s mother, who: ‘*Veio do Sul/numa leva de contratados/Teve filhos negros/que trocam hoje peixe/por cachça/Teve filhos mestiços/Uns forros ... perdidos em rixas de navalhas/Outros foram ao norte/com seus pais brancos/e o seu coração/já não lembra o rostinho deles!*’ (Tenreiro 1942, 18).<fnref n="44" /> It is worth noting the particular work conditions that characterised Portuguese colonies like São Tomé, where the figure of the *contratado* was the most common during the colonial period. *Contratad*s were deported from other colonies, mainly Angola, for compensating the scarcity of workforce in the plantations. They were not formally enslaved but worked under hard exploitation and were denied all autonomy and citizenship rights.

While Carlota represented the population of Portuguese Atlantic islands by African subalterns, White settling was represented by ‘*Romance do Seu Silva Costa*’: ‘*Seu Silva Costa chegou na ilha/Fez comércio di álcool/Fez comercio di homem/Fez comercio di terra/ Virou branco grande*’ (Tenreiro 1942, 13-14).<fnref n="45" /> Several poems of the collection developed the aforementioned themes of ‘*Negro de todo o mundo*’ and of transatlantic Negritude, evoking Liberia, histories of abolitionism and the famous participation of Black athletes in the 1936 Berlin Olympics: ‘*Quando nas Olimpiadas/corres*

<footnote n="42">⁴² Mother! Miles between us! A race between us! Yet, this book is for you.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³ I was born in that distant land, in a day of drums playing/Hence this hurry of living.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ She came from the South/in a group of contracted workers/She had Black children/who today exchange fish/for cachça/She had mixed-race children/Some freed ... lost in razor-sharp fights/Others went to the north/with their white parents/and her heart/does no longer remember their little faces.</footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ Mr Silva Costa arrived on the island/He traded alcohol/He traded men/He traded land/He turned into a Big White Man.</footnote>
veloz/é a África que está chegando' (Tenreiro 1942, 32).<fnref n="46" /> Black music was likewise a way to run for
for social conquests: 'Segue em frente irmão!/Que a tua música/seja o ritmo de uma conquista'.<fnref n="47" /> On
the other side, an idealized view of African nature as violated by slavery and exploitation emerged
from poems such as 'Canto do òbó' [Forest's Song]: 'Os olhos do branco/como chicotes/ferem o mato
que está gritando' (Tenreiro 1942, 45).<fnref n="48" /> Similarly, idyllic descriptions of São Tomé's landscape of
tropical crops, with its sun and its sea, ended with a cry of liberation. 'Apesar da pólvora que o branco
trouxe num navio escuro/... Dizerem império do branco/é terra de homens cantando vida que os
brancos jamais souberam' (Tenreiro 1942, 53).<fnref n="49" />

The late poems of Tenreiro, in part published after his death, addressed similar themes, deepened by
the direct experience of his native land that he had during his fieldwork sojourns from 1956 to 1962.
The latest one, 1963 ‘Amor de África’, exposed the anticolonial imagination (Anderson 2007) that
still haunted Tenreiro’s thoughts. There, the poet evoked Bandung themes in mentioning
decolonisation processes ongoing in Africa as well as in Indochina and Indonesia where also the
lasting Portuguese colony of Timor Est was located, and likewise provided with a local movement
for national liberation. ‘Oh África do Nilo e do Zaire oh África do Zambeze e do Níger/quem em ti
está pensando de coração em África?/África dos rios velhos e ruínas ossificadas de Zimbabwé/China
das muralhas de crisântemo e sangue/Malaias e Indonésias com encruzilhadas de sonho e
febre/Indochina da virilidade com abraços tricolores de fraternité e palavras de balas/quem em vós
está pensando de coração em África, nas Chinas e Malaias, Indonésias e Indochinas de sonhos
crispados’ (Tenreiro 1982, 99).<fnref n="50" />

Thus, the logic outcomes of this geopoetics were decolonisation and emancipation, made directly by
those Black peoples who, for Tenreiro, were despised for not having produced Rubens' paintings or
Bach's fugues. Yet, liberation 'de sabedoria de África e dos pretos claro está!' (Tenreiro 1982, 102),<fnref n="51" />

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ When you run fast/in the Olympics/it is Africa coming.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Keep strong brother/shall your music/be the rhythm of a conquest.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ The White man's eyes/like whips/wound the forest, which is crying.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ Despite the dust that the White man brought in a dark ship/...They say it was the empire of the White man/It is the land of men who sing life, which the Whites never knew.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ Oh Africa of the Nile and Zaire, oh Africa of the Zambezi and Niger/Who in you is thinking with their heart in Africa?/Africa of the old rivers and ossified ruins of Zimbabwe/China of the walls of chrysanthemum and blood/Malaysia and Indonesia with crossroads of dreams and fever/Indochina of virility with tricolour hugs of fraternité and words of bullets/Who in you is thinking with their heart in Africa, in these Chinas and Malaysias, Indonesias and Indochinas of tense dreams.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ Stands clear by knowledge of Africa and of Black people.</footnote>
carried out by transnational, multilingual, anticolonial but also anti-chauvinist geopoetics whose role
in informing grassroots movements of liberation and their daily cultural life still deserves further
work.

Conclusion

Finally, it is worth noting that Portuguese-speaking Negritude was relatively short-lived in relation to
his more famous, but sometimes more compromising, French-speaking counterpart. Once in power
in Senegal, this latter's key exponent Senghor went to Brazil pleasing Luso-tropicalist stereotypes by
endorsing Latinity as the base of a phantasmatic 'Afro-Luso-Brazilian community' (Dávila 2010,
118), disappointing the anticolonial activist of African Portuguese colonies. However, this was one
of the earliest attempts to develop African-Brazilian relations, hindered by the many-centuried
centrality of Europe in relation to both (Dávila 2010). Only in the last decades Brazil attempted to
play an effective leading role in these South-South relations. From the standpoint of cultural politics,
the introduction of its systematic study in Brazil rescued 'Lusophone African literature' from its
longstanding exclusion from 'the mainstream of African literary studies' (Helgesson and Stella 2023,
139). This induced a 'Brazilianisation of African literature' (Helgesson and Stella 2023, 146), in the
context of a renewed centrality of Brazil as a 'new republic of letters' from transatlantic Black
literature (Can and Bano 2023; González Doval 2023), arguably an indirect outcome of the early
anticolonial spirit of Lusophone Negritude.

While these further developments go beyond the scope of this paper, I have exposed here the
potentialities of studying geopoetic contributions to histories of decolonisation for understanding
their performative and prefigurative potentialities in fostering anti-colonial imaginations, and later
activism. These entangled geopoetics concern both the transnational and multilingual concrete
circulation of ideas, practices and people in diasporic anticolonial circuits, and the reinvention of
spaces and places of decolonisation that anticolonial movements deployed, starting from geopoetics
in the case of Lusophone Negritude as addressed in this paper. This geopoetics was mainly based on
tensions between a global scale of struggle for racial and social liberation and its concrete places and
local landscapes, through a critical reappropriation of tropicalist topics, proudly claiming African
roots and intimate places in a cosmopolite context.

F. Ferretti, 2025: “Geopoetics of distance: the anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic negritude”, **Geoforum**, 163, 104317, [10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317)
A key point of this analysis has been rethinking the figure of Tenreiro, whose geo-poetics of diaspora
and distance can be considered as full part of current ideas of decolonial/anticolonial geo-poetics given
their contribution to the movements for the liberation of Lusophone Africa. We can grasp the scholarly
and activist relevance of this output at the condition that we avoid thinking within too rigid
disciplinary cases and considering ‘geography’ only works that are institutionally canonised (and also
more conventional and censored in Tenreiro’s case) as such. In this sense, further parallels can be
drawn between figures such as Tenreiro and Mário Domingues, who likewise remained cautious in
the years of the dictatorship, but continued intellectual work hardly aligning to widespread
collaborationism. Accordingly, we should not consider a unique (and even less a nationalistic) model
for decolonisation, as anticolonial purposes can be translated into plural and complex discourses and
practices. All these practices can have their contradictions: the very failures of ‘constitutional’
decolonisation should stimulate further reflections on the need of cultural work for decolonisation
and social emancipation: geo-poetics proves to be a powerful tool to foster these approaches in the
academy and outside.

References

Alfieri, N., 2019. Noémia de Sousa, ou ser “África da cabeça aos pés” em tempos de colonização. *Journal of Lusophone Studies* 4(2), 219-233.

Amaral, I., 2010. Recordando o grande amigo e colega Francisco Tenreiro. In: Mata, I. (Ed.), *Francisco José Tenreiro, as múltiplas faces de um intelectual*. Lisboa: Colibri, pp. 34-40.

Anderson, B., 2007. *Under three flags: Anarchism and the anticolonial imagination*. New York: Verso.

Andrade, M.P., 1958. *Poesia negra de expressão portuguesa*. Paris: Oswald.
1969. *La poésie africaine d'expression portugaise*. Paris: Oswald.

Andrade, M.P., 1975. *Antologia temática de poesia africana. Cabo Verde, São Tomé e Príncipe, Guiné, Angola, Moçambique. Vol. I Na noite gravida de punhais*. Lisbon: Sá da Costa.

Andrade, M.P., 1979. *Antologia temática de poesia africana. Cabo Verde, São Tomé e Príncipe, Guiné, Angola, Moçambique. Vol. II O canto armado*. Lisbon: Sá da Costa.

Andrade, M.P., 1997. *Uma entrevista dada a Michel Laban*. Lisbon: João Sá da Costa.

Andrade, M.P., Messiant, C., 1999. Sur la première génération du MPLA: 1948-1960. *Lusotopie* 6, 185-221

F. Ferretti, 2025: “Geopoetics of distance: the anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic negritude”, **Geoforum**, 163, 104317, [10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317)
Arnold, D., 2000. "Illusory Riches". Representations of the Tropical World, 1840-1950. *Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography* 21(1), 6-18.

Bámgbóşé, G., 2024. A weapon of responsibility: the lyric cry in Alda Espírito Santo’s and Maria Manuela Margarido’s negritude poetics. *Interventions* 26(3-4), 467-489.

Bledsoe, A., Wright, W.J. 2019. The pluralities of Black Geographies. *Antipode* 51(2), 419–437.

Bowd, G., Clayton, D., 2019. *Impure and Worldly Geography. Pierre Gourou and Tropicality*. Abingdon: Routledge.

Can, N.A. 2023. African literatures in the Portuguese language: singularities. *The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry*, 10(2), 148–161.

Can, N.H. and Bano, I.M. 2023. Brazil—A New Republic of African Letters? *The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry* 10(2), 217–231.

Castelo, C., 1999. “*O modo português de estar no mundo*”. *O Luso-Tropicalismo e a ideologia colonial portuguesa* (1933-1961). Porto: Edições Afrontamento.

Castelo, C., Jerónimo, M.B., 2017 (Eds.). *Casa dos Estudantes do Império, dinâmicas coloniais conexões transnacionais*. Lisbon: Edições 70.

Césaire, A., 1956. *Lettre à Maurice Thorez*. Paris: Présence Africaine.

Chabal, P., (ed.). 1996. *The post-colonial literature of lusophone Africa*. London: Hurst.

Chabal, P., 2003. *Amílcar Cabral: Revolutionary leadership and people's war*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chari, S., 2019. Subaltern sea? Indian Ocean errantry against subalternization. In: Jazeel, T., Legg, S. (Eds.) *Subaltern Geographies*. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, pp. 191-209.

Clayton, D., 2013. Militant tropicality. War, revolution and the reconfiguration of ‘the Tropics’ c.1940-c.1975. *Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers* 38(1) 180-192.

Clayton, D., 2022. Decolonisation and the unhomely tropicality of Pierre Gourou and Orlando Ribeiro, 1943-1982. *Terra Brasilis* 17, http://journals.openedition.org/terrabrasilis/11046

Cleminson, R., 2019. Anarchism and anticolonialism in Portugal (1919-1926): Mário Domingues, *A Batalha* and Black internationalism. *Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies* 25(3), 441–465.

Coutinho, A.S.B., 2017. Os sócios cabo verdianos e guineenses da casa dos Estudantes do Império: socialização e trajetórias políticas. In Castelo, C., Jerónimo, M.B. (Eds.) *Casa dos Estudantes do Império, dinâmicas coloniais conexões transnacionais*. Lisbon: Edições 70, pp. 115-130.

Craggs, R., Neate, H., 2024. *Decolonising geography? Disciplinary histories and the end of the British Empire in Africa, 1948-1998*. Hoboken: Wiley.

F. Ferretti, 2025: “Geopoetics of distance: the anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic negritude”, **Geoforum**, 163, 104317, [10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317)
Cresswell, T., 2022. Writing (new) worlds: poetry and place in a time of emergency. *Geografiska Annaler Series B* 104(4), 374–389.

Dávila, J. 2020. *Hotel Trópico. Brazil and the challenge of African decolonisation*. Durham: Duke University Press.

Dirlik, A. 2002. Rethinking colonialism: globalization, postcolonialism, and the nation. *Interventions* 4(3), 428-448.

Domingues, M. 2022. *A afirmação negra e a questão colonial, textos 1919-1928*. Lisbon: Tinta da China.

Driver, F., Martins, L., 2005. *Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire*. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Esson, J. and Last, A., 2020. Anti-racist learning and teaching in British geography. *Area* 52, 668–677.

Eshun, G., Madge, C. 2012. “Now let me share this with you”: Exploring poetry as a method for postcolonial geography research. *Antipode* 44(4), 1395-1428.

Falconi, J., 2024. African women’s trajectories and the *Casa dos Estudantes do Império. Ethnic and Racial Studies* 47(7), 1403-1419.

Fele, B. [Andrade, M.P.] 1955a. Qu'est-ce que le 'luso-tropicalismo'? *Présence Africaine* 2(4), 24-35.

Fele, B. [Andrade, M.P.] 1955b. Massacres à São Tome. *Présence Africaine* 1(I-II), 146-152.

Ferraz de Oliveira, A. 2024. Futures past and futures present: Geopolitical thought and intellectual history. *Dialogues in Human Geography* 14(2), 207-211.

Ferreira, M. 1982. Prefácio. In: Tenreiro, F.J., Andrade, M.P. (Eds.) *Poesia negra de expressão Portuguesa*. Linda-a-Velha: Africa, pp. 13-39.

Ferreira, P.M. 2024. Filiações diaspóricas e anticolonialidade: Francisco José Tenreiro e Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida em diálogo. In: Tocco, V., Araújo, F., André, C.A. (Eds.). *Mundos de língua portuguesa. Olhares cruzados*. Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, pp. 129-156.

Ferretti, F. 2020. From the drought to the mud: rediscovering geo-poetics and cultural hybridity from the Global South. *cultural geographies* 27, 597–613.

Ferretti, F. 2021. Geopolitics of decolonisation: the subaltern diplomacies of Lusophone Africa (1961-1974). *Political Geography* 85, 1023-1047.

F. Ferretti, 2025: “Geopoetics of distance: the anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic negritude”, **Geoforum**, 163, 104317, [10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317)
Ferretti, F. 2022. Social tropicalism, engaged geography and the Brazilian ‘hub’: The South as a place for the production of critical knowledge (1930s-1950s). *Revue d'histoire des sciences humaines* 41, https://journals.openedition.org/rhsh/7568

Flaherty-Echeverría, S., 2015. Noémia de Sousa’s work as a translator: Reflections on *Discurso sobre o Colonialismo. Interdisciplinary Journal of Portuguese Diaspora Studies* 4 (1), 115-124.

Freyre, G. 1933. *Casa Grande e Senzala*. Rio de Janeiro: Maia & Schmidt.

Garcia, J.L. 2022. Mário Domingues, precursor da afirmação negra e do anticolonialismo. In: Domingues, M. *A afirmação negra e a questão colonial, textos 1919-1928*. Lisboa: Tinta da China, pp. 11-84.

Getachew, A. 2019. *Worldmaking after empire: the rise and fall of self-determination*. Princeton: Princeton University Press

Gilroy, P. 1993. *The Black Atlantic*. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Glissant, E. 1990. *Poétique de la relation*. Paris: Gallimard.

González Doval, H. 2023. The Eurocentric constant: an approach to the study of Mozambican literature. *The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry* 10(2), 198–216.

Hamilton, R.G. 1991. Lusophone Literature in Africa: Lusofonia, Africa, and matters of languages and letters. *Callaloo*, 14(2), 324-335.

Hawthorne, C., Lewis, J.S. (Eds.) 2023. *The Black geographic: Praxis, resistance, futurity*. Durham: Duke University Press.

Helgesson, S. and Stella, M. 2023. The Luso-African literary world: Introduction. *The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry* 10(2), 139–147.

Hirsch, S., Van der Walt, L. (eds.) 2010. *Anarchism and syndicalism in the colonial and postcolonial World, 1870-1940*. Leiden: Brill.

Kilomba, G. 2019. *Memórias da plantação: episódios de racismo quotidiano*. Lisboa: Orfeu Negro.

Laranjeira, P. 1985. Francisco José Tenreiro a preto e branco. In França J.A. (Ed.) *Les litteratures africaines de langue portugaise*. Paris: Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, pp. 423-429.

Laranjeira, P. 2010. Francisco José Tenreiro poeta do neo-realismo negro. In Mata, I. (Ed.) *Francisco José Tenreiro, as múltiplas faces de um intelectual*. Lisboa: Colibri, pp.183-186.

Last, A. 2017. We are the world? Anthropocene cultural production between geo poetics and geopolitics. *Theory, Culture & Society* 34(2-3), 147–168.

Magrane, E., Russo, L., De Leeuw, S., Santos Perez, C. (Eds.) 2020. *Geopoetics in practice*. Abingdon: Routledge.

F. Ferretti, 2025: “Geopoetics of distance: the anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic negritude”, **Geoforum**, 163, 104317, 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317
Margarido, A. 1994. A literatura e a consciência nacional. In *Antologias de poesia da casa dos estudantes do império, 1951-1963, Angola, S. Tomé e Príncipe*, vol. I. Lisbon: UCLLA.

Margarido, A., Castro Henriques, I. 2010, São Tomé e Príncipe, a revelação da modernidade. In Mata, I. (Ed.) *Francisco José Tenreiro, as múltiplas faces de um intelectual*. Lisboa: Colibri, pp. 67-92.

Martins, H. 2017. *Casa dos Estudantes do Império, subsídios para a história do seu período mais decisivo (1953-1961)*. Alfragide: Caminho.

Mata, I., (Ed.) 2010. *Francisco José Tenreiro, as múltiplas faces de um intelectual*. Lisboa: Colibri.

Mata, I., Padilha, L.C. (eds) 2000. *Mário Pinto de Andrade: um intelectual na política*. Lisboa: Colibri.

Nascimento, A. 2017. *O genocidio do negro brasileiro. Processo de um racismo mascarado*. São Paulo: Perspectiva.

Nassar, A., 2021. Geopoetics: Storytelling against mastery. *Dialogues in Human Geography* 11(1), 27–30.

Oliveira, F.R. 2022. Geografia e colonialismo português no equador. *Terra Brasilis*, 17 http://journals.openedition.org/terrabrasilis/10766

Oliveira, F.R. 2024. *Francisco Tenreiro, geógrafo, Exposição fotográfica, https://www.igot.ulisboa.pt/sites/default/files/documents/document/2024/20240112stomefolhanova visualizacao.pdf*

Oliveira, F.R. 2024. Domingues, S., 2024. O fundo fotográfico Francisco Tenreiro do Centro de Estudos Geográficos da Universidade de Lisboa: recuperação, incorporações e possibilidades de reutilização. *Finisterra* LIX(127), e39084.

Paiva, D. 2020. Poetry as a resonant method for multi-sensory research. *Emotion, Space and Society* 34, 100655.

Paiva, D. 2022. A criação artística como fonte para a história da geografia. *Terra Brasilis* 17, http://journals.openedition.org/terrabrasilis/11304

Paiva, D., Oliveira, F.R. 2020. Luso-Brazilian geographies? The making of epistemic communities in semi-peripheral academic human geography. *Progress in Human Geography* 45(3), 489-512.

Parreira, A. 2000. Mário Pinto de Andrade: dois livros e uma homenagem. In: Mata, I., Padilha, L. C. (Eds) *Mário Pinto de Andrade: um intelectual na política*, Lisboa: Colibri, pp. 173-180.

Pasolini, P.P. 1961. La resistenza negra. In Andrade M.P. (ed.) *Letteratura negra. I poeti*. Rome: Editori Riuniti, pp. xv-xxiv.

F. Ferretti, 2025: “Geopoetics of distance: the anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic negritude”, **Geoforum**, 163, 104317, 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317
Pereira, P.S. 2023. Mário Domingues, Ferreira de Castro e a “línea de cor” nas letras portuguesas. *Revista Brasileira de História* 43(93), 105-129.

Pimenta, F.T. 2006. *Angola no percurso de um nacionalista: conversas com Adolfo Maria*. Porto: Afrontamento.

Pimenta, J.R., Sarmento, J., Azevedo, A.F. 2011. Luso-tropicalism: Tropical geography under dictatorship, 1926–1974. *Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography* 32(2), 220–235.

Power, M. 2020. (Luso) tropicalità and the Materiality of Decolonization. *Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography* 41(1), 154-158.

Power, M., Sidaway, J. D. 2004. The degeneration of tropical geography. *Annals of the Association of American Geographers* 94(3), 585-601.

Puttick, S. and Murrey, A. 2020. Confronting the deafening silence on race in geography education in England: learning from anti-racist, decolonial and Black geographies. *Geography* 105(3), 126-134.

Ramalho, V. 2017 (Ed). *Casa dos Estudantes do Império, 50 anos – testemunhos, vivências, documentos*. Lisbon: UCCLA

Reza, A. 2016. African anti-colonialism and the *Ultramarinos* of the *Casa dos Estudantes do Império*. *Journal of Lusophone Studies* 1(1), 37-56.

Reza, A. 2024. *Anticolonial form: literary journals at the end of Empire*. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ribeiro, O. 1963. *Francisco Tenreiro (1921-1963)*. Lisbon: Universidade de Lisboa.

Rocha, E. 2010. Francisco José Tenreiro, o poeta dos dois destinos. In Mata, I. (Ed.) *Francisco José Tenreiro, as múltiplas faces de um intelectual*. Lisboa: Colibri, pp. 41-45.

Sampaio, M.L. 2022. No centenário do nascimento de Francisco José Tenreiro (1921-1963): mediações e perspectivas. *Buala, https://www.buala.org/pt/a-ler/no-centenario-do-nascimento-de-francisco-jose-tenreiro-1921-1963-mediacoes-e-perspetivas*

Santos, E.R. 2025. *The Late postcolonial condition. Twenty-first century reconfigurations in the literatures of Portuguese-speaking Africa*. Oxford : Lang.

Sartre, J.P. 1985. Orphée noir. In Senghor, L.S. *Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française*. Paris: PUF, pp. I-XLIV

Seibert, G. 2010. Francisco José Tenreiro, o homem além do poeta. In Mata, I. (Ed.) *Francisco José Tenreiro, as múltiplas faces de um intelectual*. Lisboa: Colibri, pp 117-144.

F. Ferretti, 2025: “Geopoetics of distance: the anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic negritude”, **Geoforum**, 163, 104317, [10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317)
Seibert, G. 2013. Tenreiro, Amador e os Angolares ou a reinvenção da história de São Tomé. In Silva, M.C., Saraiva, C. (Eds.) *As lições de Jill Dias*. Etnográfica Press, https://doi.org/10.4000/books.etnograficapress.529

Senghor, L.S. 1985. *Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française*. Paris: PUF.

Sidaway, J.D., Power, M. 2005. 'The tears of Portugal': Empire, identity, 'race', and destiny in Portuguese geopolitical narratives. *Environment and Planning D: Society and Space* 23, 527-554.

Sidaway, J.D., Yeoh, B., Bunnell, T. 2018. Editorial. *Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography* 39(3), 328-331.

Sousa J.S. 2010. Amílcar Cabral, um contemporâneo de Francisco José Tenreiro no Portugal dos anos 40 e 50 do século XX. In Mata, I. (Ed.) *Francisco José Tenreiro, as múltiplas faces de um intelectual*. Lisboa: Colibri, pp. 145-166.

Tenreiro, F.J. 1942. *Ilha de nome santo*. Coimbra: Portugalia.

Tenreiro, F.J. 1961. *A ilha de São Tomé. Estudo geográfico*. Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar.

Tenreiro, F.J. 1982 *Coraçao em Africa*. Linda-a-velha: Africa.

The Black Mediterranean Collective [Proglio, G., Hawthorne, C., Danewid, I., Saucier, K., Grimaldi, K., Pesarini, A., Raeymaekers, T., Grechi, G., Gerrand. V.] 2021. *The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, borders, and citizenship*. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tornimbeni, C. 2022. The CONCP in Southern Africa and the OAU's Liberation Committee: Settling internal disputes for the independence of Angola and Mozambique. *Journal of Southern African Studies* 48(6), 1099-1117.

Xavier, A.B. 2018. Reducing difference in the Portuguese empire? A case study from early-modern Goa. In Aboim, S., Granjo, P., Ramos, A. (Eds.) *Changing societies: Legacies and challenges. Vol. I*. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, pp. 241-261.

F. Ferretti, 2025: “Geopoetics of distance: the anticolonial geographies of Lusophone diasporic negritude”, **Geoforum**, 163, 104317, [10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104317)