An aesthetics of vulnerability: critical approaches to Afrodescendant Portuguese literature

This dissertation examines the relationship between colonial vulnerability and Afrodescendant literature in Portugal. Western colonialism involved not only the exploitation of peoples and lands but also an aesthetic project that dehumanized colonized populations through stereotypes, erasing their subjectivities and histories. This colonial imagery portrayed Black subjects merely as sites of harm or dereliction, stripped of agency and any capacity for self-representation. These aesthetic ideologies reflect a racialized grammar that persists in traditional Portuguese literature and social memory. Following growing interest in the recent affirmation of Afrodescendant literature in Portugal, this study explores how six novels by Afrodescendant Portuguese authors articulate corporeal, enunciative, and memory vulnerability as sites of misappropriation. The selected novels — Luísa Semedo’s O canto da Moreia, Yara Nakahanda Monteiro’s Essa dama bate bué, Joaquim Arena’s Debaixo da nossa pele: uma viagem, and three works by Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, specifically Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso, Maremoto, and As Telefones — question the racial regimes of representation within the national literary canon. Grounded in Black and decolonial feminist theories, this thesis argues that these novels reclaim vulnerability from colonial frameworks, transforming it into a subversive expression against contemporary necropolitical representations. Methodologically, the study undertakes a close reading of four fictional elements — temporality, characterization, language aesthetics, and spatiality — to examine how misappropriated narratives of colonial and neoliberal injury counteract the precarity colonialism imposes on Black bodies and memories. This analysis reveals a counter-aesthetic of vulnerability, where the protagonists, despite their exposure to violence, resist passive objectification. By challenging anti-Black modern aesthetics, these novels establish ‘decolonial grammars’ that affirm the agency, inwardness, and subjectivity of Black characters within Portuguese literature, offering alternative modes of self-representation that defy and subvert colonial historicity and power.