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“WE SPEAK BACK!”

Challenging Belonging and Anti-Blackness in Portugal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2020

Celeste Vaughan Curington
Celeste Vaughan Curington*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, North Carolina State University
*
Corresponding author: Celeste Vaughan Curington, Assistant Professor of Sociology, North Carolina State University, 1991 Bldg., 10 Current Drive, Campus Box 8107, Raleigh, NC 27695-8107. E-mail: ccuring@ncsu.edu
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Abstract

A body of scholarship interrogates conventional notions of citizenship, viewing full social inclusion beyond formal status and as a matter of belonging. This paper integrates the perspective of anti-Blackness with that of belonging and theorizes anti-Black non-belonging. Based on more than a year of fieldwork in the Lisbon metropolitan area, I illustrate how the reality of anti-Black non-belonging in Portugal means that African-descendant women are vulnerable to racist, everyday practices in public space that impact their individual and group reality and feelings of national belonging. Employing a counter narrative methodology, I argue that Cape Verdean women’s narratives of anti-Black non-belonging illustrate the agentic strategy that they deploy to carve our alternative modes of belonging as they navigate their everyday lives. Their accounts illustrate the continued need for African-descendant women to draw from their everyday knowledge of domination to employ resistance, whether through their own parenting or through their own reactionary voices in public space. Anti-Black non-belonging is therefore both a form of racialization and a matter of resistance; as African-descendent women are racialized as foreign, non-being, and out of place, they also challenge the ideology of Portuguese anti-racialism that places Africans and African descendants outside of European citizenry.

Keywords

Anti-BlacknessRacializationRacismEuropeAnti-racialismImmigrationPortugal
Type
State of the Art
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , Fall 2020 , pp. 337 - 362
Copyright
© 2020 Hutchins Center for African and African American Research

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