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This chapter illustrates an analytical framework for understanding the development of Lusophone Africa in relation to the Portuguese-speaking world, particularly Portugal and Brazil. The interconnectedness between the nations within the “Lusophone transatlantic matrix” sprang from their collective experience of Portuguese colonialism and the slave trade that also involved both the colonial and independent Brazil. The chapter also details Lusophone Africa’s ideological, cultural, political, and material linkages with Portugal and Brazil, all of which are grounded in the colonial era. It highlights the emergence of Afro-Portuguese culture; the impact of Brazilian popular culture to Africa, as well as Brazil’s African roots; the dissemination of Portuguese and Brazilian media across Lusophone Africa; and the developing economic and political relations of Africa to both Portugal and Brazil.

This chapter examines the films produced in Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau in view of the emergence of the market economy model and multiparty politics in the late 1980s. It features film directors Flora Gomes and Licínio Azevedo, along with several archetypal examples of Angolan and Cape Verdean films. The movie industry had a significant part in illustrating Lusophone Africa’s liberation struggles and in campaigning for the political movements that surfaced following its independence. The chapter begins by discussing the roles of Angola and Mozambique in the history of early African cinema, its geopolitics, and the politics of film language. It then presents a study of the cinematic depiction of the effects of civil war in both countries.

This chapter explores the possible links between postcolonial studies and the cultures of Latin America and Lusophone Africa. The essay of J. Jorge Klor de Alva is dealt to formulate both the temporal and geopolitical dimension, and the critical dimension of postcoloniality. These dimensions are described by Peter Hulme and Walter Mignolo in ‘Including America’ and ‘La razón postcolonial: herencias coloniales y teorías postcoloniales’, respectively. This chapter reveals that the associations with Latin America situate Lusophone Africa within an even wider network of political and cultural relations. An overview of the chapters included in this book is presented.

This chapter presents some final thoughts. As a group, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São TomÉ and Príncipe represent an epitome of the African continent with splendid variations of population, land mass, geopolitical authority, and economic structure. In general, the book focuses on gaps in Lusophone Africa’s democratization process and the absence of total economic independence, albeit the political autonomy of its nation-states is undisputed. The outcome of Africa’s independence meant a transition from autocratic one-party states and integrated economies to market-oriented multiparty states, and is an indication of both a shortfall in social justice and abundance of idealistic hope.

The 1953 poetry notebook Poesia negra de expressão portuguesa [Black Poetry of Portuguese Expression] was first work that brought together negritude poetry from across the Lusophone African world. Edited by Angolan intellectual Mário Pinto de Andrade and Sao Tomean poet Francisco Tenreiro, the short collection declares itself an anti-colonial intervention into the negritude movements underway in the Francophone world since the 1930s. Little has been made, however, of the notebook’s dedication to Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén or the inclusion of Guillén’s poem “Son Número 6” [Son Number 6] in the collection. This article argues that the juxtaposition of Guillén’s “Son No. 6” with the Lusophone poems consolidates an alternative transatlanticism that emphasizes Guillén as a black poet, rather than themes of racial and cultural mixing, and thus shifts the circuits of collaboration away from francophone negritude's colony-metropole axis to the South. Poetic techniques such as call-and-response and the socially-embedded, metonymic construction of blackness shared among Guillén and Lusophone poets Agostinho Neto, Noémia de Sousa, and António Jacinto show how the notebook establishes the origins of both negritude poetry and negritude identity in the trans-Atlantic poetic conversation itself.