This panel proposes an exploration of African and Afro-descendant imaginaries in the Iberian Peninsula in the 20th and 21st centuries as expressed in literature and other arts (cinema, music, dance, plastic arts, photography, etc.) in the languages of both countries. We will explore the works of writers and artists who work from the Iberian Peninsula, and who consciously situate themselves in this place as a point of departure or arrival, against the backdrop of their relationship with Africa. In both Spain and Portugal, different groups of writers and artists with these characteristics can be distinguished: they are either people in a situation of permanent (or temporary) immigration, or people born in the Iberian Peninsula, of African descent, often with links in the Spanish-speaking areas (Equatorial Guinea) and Portuguese (Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé e Príncipe), but also with other territories and languages on the African continent.

We ask ourselves, what is the place of belonging, the imagined homeland of these writers and artists? In Spain, journalist Lucía Mbomío explained in her inaugural column ‘Barrionalismos’ in El País that it is Alcorcón, her neighborhood in Madrid, the only place where she has felt ‘at home’ and where she is recognized as ‘owning’ the neighborhood in the face of the insistent denial of her Spanish identity because of her racial profile (Mbomío Rubio 2018). The same opinion was shown by the young ‘cabobercianos’, who answered without hesitation that ‘de Bembibre’, a town in Bierzo, the place that identified them as the sons of the Cape Verdeans who went to work in the mines of León (Cebrones 2018). In Portugal, writer of Portuguese-Angolan descent Yara Nakahanda Monteiro states “eu sou de onde estou,” demonstrating a flexibility and adaptability to life circumstances (Wieser interview 2021 and 2024). Others are inscribed in more ethereal spaces, hardly reducible to a territory to use, such as negritude and hip-hop (Frank T, interview by Mbomío Rubio 2017) or other musical styles such as kuduro and kizomba (Kalaf Epalanga, interview by Wieser 2021). A neighborhood, a village or an imagined community.

In all cases they are spaces defined by their relationship to Africa, and this relationship is imbued with a variety of different feelings, from nostalgia, pain, and mourning, to identification, pride, and exaltation. Thus, we also ask ourselves, what is the relationship of African and Afro-descendant creators living in the Iberian Peninsula with Africa? Through what traces, memories, oral histories, songs or rhythms does the idea of Africa return to the present? In this panel, we would like to establish a dialogue between Portuguese and Spanish-speaking African production by reflecting on literary and artistic productions that explore the construction of places of belonging in their dynamics between history, memory and fiction. Along this path, proposals that discuss the relevance of the use of terms such as Afro-descendant, diaspora, migration, and exile are also welcome.

While in Portugal the study of Portuguese-language African literatures was institutionalized in 1975 as a consequence of the Carnation Revolution and therefore already has a well-established academic tradition with great specialists, the field of study of African literatures in Spain is more recent. However, the literature of African descent and the literature of immigrant Africans is a recent phenomenon throughout the Peninsula. Pioneering studies on these literary and artistic creations have been published in recent years both in Portugal (Mata e Évora 2021, Wieser 2021 e 2024, Khan e Sousa 2023) and in Spain (Miampika and Arroyo 2010; Miampika 2015; Angone 2018; García 2018; Abé Pans 2019; Borst 2021; Bernechea 2022; Borst and Gallo González 2024) and also on a European scale that has sometimes included these two spaces (Brancato 2008; Borst and Gallo González 2019; Fraticelli and López Vilar 2022; Ricci 2023; Borst, Neu-Wendel, and Tauchnitz 2023). With the present approach we hope to make a valuable contribution to the broadening and deepening of this interdisciplinary field of knowledge.