The rationale for organizing this session lies in the need to bring sustained attention to how colonial legacies are revisited and contested across Lusophone Africa and Portugal, five decades after the independence of Lusophone African countries. While existing scholarship has often focused on national or case-specific analyses, this panel offers a comparative and transatlantic framework that brings São Tomé and Príncipe, Cabo Verde, and Portugal into dialogue. In doing so, it addresses a gap in the field by foregrounding interdisciplinary approaches that connect literature, anthropology, linguistics, cultural history, and memory studies. The session responds to ongoing debates about post-imperial identity, language, and cultural production, emphasizing how these processes remain central to understanding the afterlives of empire in both institutional and everyday contexts.

The session will be structured with each of the four presenters allotted fifteen minutes to present their papers, followed by a collective discussion period of at least fifteen minutes. This format ensures a balance between focused scholarly presentation and open intellectual exchange, encouraging dialogue.

Patrícia Martinho Ferreira’s paper, “Alda Espírito Santo and the Performance of African Liberation,” examines the Santomean poet Alda Espírito Santo as a form of orature and collective performance. Through analysis of selected poems, Martinho Ferreira will demonstrate how rhythm, voice, and communal expression function as a praxis of anti-colonial resistance and post-imperial memory. Kevin W. Ennis, in “Conceição Lima’s Countercolonial Circumnavigation,” explores how Lima’s poetry engages space, history, and Atlantic memory through countercolonial frameworks. His paper highlights how Indigenous and Afro-diasporic epistemologies challenge imperial narratives and foreground alternative ways of knowing geography and historical consciousness in the Lusophone Atlantic. Márcia Rego’s “After Empire: Language, Policy, and Everyday Speech in Cabo Verde” investigates the dynamic interplay between Portuguese and Kriolu in post-imperial Cabo Verde. Through analysis grounded in anthropology and linguistics, she examines language policy, oral genres, and everyday speech as sites where postcolonial identity and linguistic sovereignty are continuously negotiated. Isabela Ramos, in “Narrating the Colonial War in Post-Imperial Portugal: Memory and Identity in Museum Discourse,” analyzes how museum narratives construct and mediate memory of the Portuguese Colonial War. Her paper interrogates whether contemporary museum discourse reproduces or challenges entrenched colonial imaginaries within Portuguese national identity.

The selection of panelists reflects a diversity of voices, bringing together scholars from different geographic regions, institutional settings, and career stages, as well as from a range of interdisciplinary backgrounds. This composition creates a transnational dialogue that bridges perspectives from across the Portuguese-speaking world and beyond, while also incorporating varied academic traditions and frameworks. We envision this panel as a space to foster debate and exchange knowledge on post-imperial narratives as dynamic and contested processes in Lusophone Africa and Portugal.