This year, four former Portuguese colonies in Africa—Angola, São Tomé and Príncipe, Cape Verde, and Mozambique—commemorate 50 years of independence. From the wars of independence onward, African migrants have turned to the colonial metropole in search of economic and political stability, and better job and educational opportunities. As they reshaped the contours of Portuguese society, these waves of immigrants also gave way to the emergence of an “Afro Lisboa”, an expression used to mark the presence of large populations of African descendants living in and around Lisbon’s Greater Metropolitan Area, and recognize how the cultural productions linked to the city’s Black spaces have become strategic actors in Lisbon’s rebranding of the old metropole into a cosmopolitan space (Garrido & Raposo, 2020). Turning my attention to Lisbon’s independent record label, Príncipe Discos, my talk examines Afro Lisboa’s relationship to the artistic output of one of the label’s cultural projects, Noite Príncipe, a monthly dance night featuring batida and other Afro electronic dance musics. In so doing, I ask: what sort of sonic politics organize and characterize the social hierarchies of Afro Lisboa? How is this space meant to be heard? Seen? Based on ethnographic research, I seek to tease out these tensions, demonstrating how Principe Discos and its monthly Noite Principe party navigate a nighttime politics of Afro Lisboa, one made visible in the highly public, highly participatory, and highly performative sphere, where music is meant to fall within the confines of an accepted, respectable Black expressive culture.

Prior to 2010, Afro-descendant communities were largely absent from Spain’s cultural scene due to exclusion, discrimination, and the paucity of Black activism networks. In recent years, however, Spain has witnessed the blossoming of a new set of spaces and the emergence of new Black-led music collectives in response to the current popularity of African popular music, a global awareness of racial politics facilitated by social media networks, and the digital interconnectedness of the diaspora. A nascent Black community in Spain is developing alongside these cultural activities (historically, Afro-descendant communities in Spain were fragmented by nationality and ethnicity). The new generation also draws on the resources and experiences of the Afro-descendant communities that have been in Spain for decades. This paper explores the strategies of audibility and visibility collectives such as Voodoo, NEO, and AfroBrunch are employing. These collectives are addressing and tackling marginality within the nightlife scene and culture industry, while simultaneously fostering spaces for Black people and maintaining a network with the broader Black diaspora. As a result, inclusive social formations centered on diverse Afro-diasporic cultures are emerging. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Barcelona, I argue that these collectives are reclaiming Black sound and reshaping the lived experience of being Black in Spain against the backdrop of discriminatory attitudes and prejudice. I interpret the impact of these collectives within the frameworks of “doubling reality” (Steingo 2016) and “alternative public spheres” (Gilroy 1987). This impact serves as a means of forging “alternative social futures and richer individual lives” (Turino 2008).

Since Italy’s unification in 1861, the country’s North/South divide has elicited an anti–Southern Italian sentiment, in which Southerners were considered an inferior and barbaric race in comparison to Northerners, with the region even referred to as “Italian Africa.” In the late twentieth century, Southern Italians artists leaned into this association with Africa by producing countercultural music that sought to connect Southern Italy to the Global South, with questionable claims to Blackness (Patriarca 2021). Beginning in the 2010s, however, Black-Italian artists began to release music that connected these two geographies by drawing on their multiracial backgrounds. In this paper, I explore how these Black-Italian artists draw parallels between Southern Italy and the Global South, going beyond their white Italian predecessors to invoke lived and embodied experiences of Blackness. I draw on three case studies: first, Sardinian-­Congolese vocalist Vhelade’s 2017 album AfroSarda, which combines Sardinian dialect and Bantu rhythms to guide listeners to understand both Africa and Sardinia as colonized lands (Hawthorne 2022). Second, the multiracial musical collective Terroni Uniti’s (united Southerners) 2017 single “Gente do sud” (“People of the South,” in Neapolitan), which draws on the members’ similar experiences of oppression and resistance across (and crossing) the Mediterranean. Third, the Sierra Leonean–Italian rapper Laïoung’s 2017 song “Fuori (Je so’ pazz)” (“Out [I’m Crazy],” in Neapolitan), which riffs on Pino Daniele’s 1979 “Je so’ pazzo” and recasts Daniele’s claim that Blackness and Southern Italianness are coterminous. Ultimately, these musicians contribute to larger efforts toward anti-racism and civil rights for Black Italians.