The Portuguese Estado Novo (1933-1974) and Francoist Spain (1939-1975) shared, in addition to a repressive and ultra-Catholic policy and a patriotic ideal rooted in the imperial matrix of the age of discoveries and conquerors, a self-representation based on a supposed exceptionalism that persisted anachronistically after most of the former colonies gained independence. Seen from outside, this exceptionalism was largely real: technological backwardness, poverty, isolation, and exportable labor. Despite this, Portugal and Spain functioned as neighbors who turned their backs on each other. Postcolonial and decolonial studies have largely inherited this mutual indifference, confirming the legitimizing function of the colonial past in the ascension of both countries to the category of democratic, modern, and developed European nations. While there are many national works on dissident artistic creation in both countries during the specified period (Abellán 1980, Ruiz 2008, Gil 2009, Rojas 2013, Melo 2016, Piçarra 2018, Mateo 2020, Larraz 2023, Falconi, 2024, García 2024), the comparative perspective (Cabrera 2014, Aixelà-Cabré 2024) and, above all, the question of African participation in the development of an anti-colonial counter-archive remain pending subjects.

In Politics of African Anticolonial Archive (el-Malik and Kamola, 2017) el-Malik defines the African anticolonial archive as “a collection/collective of thinkers who placed in a single frame a set of analytical tools that did not traditionally occupy the same space within logics of coloniality: politics, governance, identity, art, poetry, social science, socialism, religion, theory, etc.” (el-Malik, el-Malik, and Kamola 2017, 49). In the Iberic case, it is worth considering that censorship and political repression worsened the dispersion and fragmentation of an informal archive formed by very diverse elements whose only common denominator would be opposition, resistance, or at the very least, contrast, in relation to official discourses. Branwen Gruffydd Jones points to a diffuse archive, whose “location” is also transnational, spreading across different geographies (Jones 2017, 66). The corpus of this archive consists of multiple forms: discursive and material, political and poetic, visual, verbal and voiced. The transnational dimension reflects the importance of circulation and transits as structuring characteristics in the formation of the textual and political culture of African anticolonialism. More than a form of data collection, investigating these characteristics is a “curatorial” form of working the archive, in the present and in Europe, looking at it more as a process than as an object (Jones 2017, 77).

Despite the noted parallels between Spain and Portugal, the magnitude of the Portuguese empire in Africa contrasts with the residual nature of Spanish possessions in Africa. We must also not forget the diachronic dimension of the period studied in both countries – from the overt propagandistic instrumentalization of artistic creation to the more or less disguised assimilationism (Lusotropicalismo, Hispanidad) – and the specific particularities of each of them – the impact of late Francoist developmentalism. It begs the question, then, of what the limits are for criteria such as dissent and clandestinity when studying a disparate set of documents that, at the time of their creation, circulated and/or related in very diverse ways. We also cannot overlook that discrimination and selection operations play a role in creating any archive, creating an illusion of totality and continuity (Mbembe, 2002, 21), especially in the case of discourses inseparable from the authoritarian and repressive context in which they emerged. In other words, besides a direct dissident stance, we must consider other forms of resistance that are more discreet or even ambiguous, and take into account that the defense of pacifism and antimilitarism was also considered a form of dissent. Another aspect to consider is the compatibility of activism with the Rancierian demand: the disruptive gaze must be both ideological and aesthetic (Rancière, 2000).

From a dual comparative and transnational perspective, we propose that the Iberian counter-archive can be investigated in order to conceive the present as an archive (el-Malik and Kamola 2017, 5–6). The present in question is the post-colonial period of European countries such as Portugal and Spain that manage their colonial pasts through not always effective diversity management models (Aixelà-Cabré 2018), knowing that ‘the transformation of the archive into a talisman, however, is also accompanied by removing any subversive factors in the memory’ (Mbembe 2000, 24), and that the counter-archive is not immune to the issue of the ‘commodification of memory’ (Mbembe 2002, 25) or the dual trap of nostalgia and authenticity (el-Malik and Kamola 2017, 5).

This activity is part of the project I+D “Africanos, magrebies y latinos (1808-1975). Negritud, resistencias y desracializacion de elites” (BLACKSPAIN) (PID2022-138689NB-I00), funded by MCIN/ AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ and “FEDER Una manera de hacer Europa”