Mario Domingues, Ferreira de Castro and the "Color Line" in Portuguese Writings

The writer and journalist Mario Domingues (1899-1977) has been slowly rediscovered, especially for his writing for the anarchist newspaper A Batalha, in which he became the first Portuguese intellectual to publicly defend the independence of the African colonies in the 1920s. His openly anti racist and anti-colonialist positions are also reflected in his fictional production, namely in the novels O Preto do Charleston (1929) and O Menino entre Gigantes (1960), and in books censored by the Estado Novo, such as Ma raca (1938). I analyze the tendencies of the antiracist discourse of his prose in comparison with Ferreira de Castro's Sangue Negro (1923), one of the only examples of antiracist fiction by white authors in this period in Portugal, seeking to understand the scope and limits of antiracism during the expansion of Portuguese colonial power in Africa and the affirmation of the modernist and neorealist movements in Portuguese writings.