We are not your Negroes: Analyzing Mural Representations of Blackness in Lisbon Metropolitan Area

While analyzing the representation of Black figures in the murals painted in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, this chapter discusses street art and postcolonial race relations. It argues that when street artists choose to depict international Black icons, such as Nelson Mandela or Tupac Shakur, as the few Black figures represented in the city center’s street art murals, they are not actively engaged with a discussion about Portuguese postcolonial race relations. The fact that mural representation of Portuguese Black figures and problems that afflict them (police violence, ethnic discrimination) is solely located in the urban periphery strengthens this argument. By not undermining the Portuguese Lusotropicalist narrative the country still grapples with in the intramuros, the city center and the open-air street art galleries, and destabilizing it only in the extramuros, the marginalized urban periphery, street artists miss the opportunity to create potentially subversive street art in Lisbon city center.