Body-Colony: a preliminary study about the representation of black women during colonial war, from Augusto Cid’s perspective in Que se passa na frente

Abstract

This work consists in a preliminary study about the representations of black women in Portugal during the colonial war (1961-1975). Following the ideas of current international women's movements (Ni una menos, Women's March, Non una di meno…) it is this article’s main goal to investigate the double hierarchization suffered by black women, as well as analyze how and whether the resistances against Portuguese fascism and colonialism affected such representations. The images of black women in Portugal during the XXth century reveal sexualized bodies, objects available to the colonizer. However, by focusing our attention on Portuguese comics, it must be remembered, as we are told by Luís Cunha (1995), that black men representation in BD changed during the century, especially during the colonial war. This article analyzes Augusto Cid's illustration published in Que se passa na frente (1973), in order to investigate if war and the resistances induced changes on the colonizer's representation of black women. By analysing it, we are allowed to meditate upon how racist and sexist stereotypes changed in the last year of fascist Portuguese regime and therefore interrogate post-25 de Abril Portuguese society in order to understand if the traces of this violence are still present.