Women of the Brown Atlantic: Real and Imaginary Passages in Portuguese 1711-2011

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There is a saying in Brazil that goes like this: if you walk under the rainbow you run the risk of changing your sex. Running after, and walking under, the rainbow is a movement that is rehearsed in the work of two key Afro-Brazilian women writers, Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914-1977) and Conceição Evaristo (1946-). The story compares the act of remembering to an impossible rainbow chase, which results in a bodily re-orientation away from classification (sex as social construction) and towards the unanticipated (identity as queer). Their engagement with the rainbow story forms the theoretical core of this project, which takes gender difference and queer identity as the key drivers for thinking about female mobility and memory making in the Brown (i.e., lusophone) Atlantic. In Brazil, the image of the rainbow is tendentiously associated with the Orisha Oxumaré, the male-female snake-like God of movements and cycles in the Candomblé Afro-Brazilian religion (Verger 2002), who holds the power to change people's sex. This project takes Oxumaré's symbol, the rainbow, arguably queerer than the rainbow flag of the LGBT movement, so as to revise the use of the archive metaphor and its historical complicity with the maritime. Rather than emphasising flows and crosscurrents, which typify existing theories of (queer) diasporic mobility, the rainbow story highlights a temporality ("running after") that is queer because it points to the impossible location of memory and identity. In order to open up this wider research, the Fellowship will focus on the particularities of memory making processes of the "Brown Atlantic," a term that names an African-based Atlantic cultural interconnectedness based on the infusion of Portuguese language, culture and blood (Almeida 2004).In tackling black women's long-term omission from critical paradigms, the Fellowship considers the ways in which black female mobility in the Brown Atlantic has been remembered and imagined, in literature, by both black women and white men. The innovative methodology will question sharply defined national, sexual and racial boundaries, favouring transnational ways of remembering and imagining movement. Furthermore, the emphasis on imagination will upset the linear patterns of the diaspora by exploring unpredictable, "blue skies" routes beyond origin-destination travelling. These correspond to routes of memory arising from serendipitous imaginary journeys that, in their refusal to be easily archived, render today's theoretical emphasis on space, archives and traceable movement accountable for their power over memory. Finally, by using the rainbow as a theoretical lens, the project will examine theories and cinematic performances that travel (literal travelling of people and ideas), and diaries, novels, short stories and letters (travelling of stories).Research will be discussed with scholars from a variety of disciplines at international conferences and in the context of a scholar in residence programme to be inaugurated at Exeter. The output of a monograph, to be submitted to Palgrave MacMillan Press (Memory Studies series), will make a major contribution to studies of the Lusophone Atlantic and Afro-Brazilian literature. Collaborations with the Museu Afro-Brasileiro in Brazil and the Núcleo Museológico de Lagos in Portugal will lead to knowledge exchange and provide material for the development of a Video Book of Mobilities, an interactive Map of Mobilities and an artistic exhibition, designed for the wider public.The project builds on my existing work on contemporary women's writing from Mozambique and Portugal, but enables me to undertake a substantially more ambitious interrogation of the relationship between lusophone nations by focusing on less visible processes of memory making across three centuries. Ultimately, it argues for the continued relevance of black female mobility to the history of the nations that make up the Brown Atlantic.