Blackface in Children's Portuguese Illustration from Estado Novo

During the Portuguese Dictatorship (Estado Novo, 1928-1974), until the beginning of the Colonial War (1961-1974), a synthetic kind of caricature - "blackface" - was the dominant way of depicting black people in Portuguese book illustrations for children. Its ubiquity in such a wide period raises urgent questions, given the importance of images in children's construction of an idea of the world and society. In this paper, resulting from a PhD research, it's intended to analyze this mocking images found in books, in relation to other objects of popular culture in Portugal and abroad. We conclude, through empirical observation and literary review, that the strong presence of blackface in Portuguese children's book illustrations from this period was made possible not only by the absorption of the satirical American minstrel show and its migration to other contexts and formats (children's literature, comics, toys, etc) but also by the consolidation of a modernist visual grammar in Portugal, combined with a racist mentality, firstly ideologically supported by "science" and later by the media - as convenient to the perpetuation of the Portuguese colonial system, even beyond its extinction.