Moorings: Portuguese Expansion and the Writing of Africa by Josiah Blackmore (review)

In the nearly four years since its publication, Josiah Blackmore’s Moorings (a punning double reference to the Portuguese maritime voyages and Muslim Africans) has earned high and well-deserved praise for its sweeping scope and the impressive erudition sustaining its innovative and often brilliant textual analyses. Although I generally share in this admiration for the hermeneutic subtleties of several of Blackmore’s readings, my own assessment of the book is considerably less favorable. Rather than a wholesale dismissal of Blackmore’s notable monograph, however, my review should be understood as an attempt to broach an alternate, less Europe-centered approach to the prolonged textual output on Africa produced by Portugal’s early modern maritime expansion.

Comprised of an introduction and three long chapters, entitled respectively, “Encountering the African,” “Expansion and the Contours of Africa,” and “the Monster of Melancholy,” the book, in Blackmore’s own words, is “about the Portuguese culture of writing on Africa in the first century and a half of maritime expansion, from Zurara’s chronicles in the mid-fifteenth century to the epic poem Os Lusíadas” published in 1572 (xv–xvi). Similarly to Maylin Newitt, who argues that one of the challenges that scholars of Portugal’s maritime expansion have historically faced is to develop a lexicon that not only adequately explains its hybrid and often unstable forms, but situates them within the paradigms available to political science, in the book’s introduction, Blackmore underscores the inadequacy of “conceptual tools and vocabularies common in imperial/colonial studies” (notably, Said’s Orientalism) to fully account for Portugal’s early modern Africanist discourses. Indeed, Blackmore argues that his focus on early modern Portuguese expansionist texts points to the necessity of examining more carefully “how empire functioned discursively” in its incipient stages (xxii). He cites approvingly Roland Greene’s assertion that postcolonialism originates in colonialism, and proposes his own study as a “possible response” to Barbara Fuchs’s call for critics to develop theoretical concepts more appropriate to early modern studies, and “to historicize postcolonial concepts in order to expose the early modern foundation of later imperialist representations” (xxiii).

The first chapter, rich in detail and conceptually dense, provides a comprehensive overview of the figure and idea of the Moor from late antiquity to the early Renaissance. It advances the double claim that the Moor becomes in a sense metonymic of the continent as a whole and that, by the end of the fifteenth century, Africa comes to occupy an interstitial place in Portuguese expansionist writings: “between an extreme East and the West—an African in-between, as it were” (11). For Blackmore, one of the key dissensions between Said’s Orientalism and Portuguese constructions of the African (or Moor) is precisely that this routinely criticized concept “glosses over the relational intricacies of the African or the Moor to Portuguese or Iberian cultures” (18). To view the imperial relationship strictly “in terms of dominance versus subjugation” results in the polarization of the subjugated other from the European colonizer, and ends up distorting the heterogeneous nature of “encounters in Africa” (21). Blackmore finds a cogent illustration of this ambivalence in Gomes Eanes de Zurara’s “Iberian” or Mediterranean racial valuation of blackness (and whiteness), that is, in the chronicler’s alleged inference that, for “a dark-skinned” European aware that his “own darkness was less than ideal” (24), blackness was a slippery concept, “dangerously close” to “Portuguese whiteness” (29, 28). One of the contradictions arising from this slippage from a situational ambivalence (involving the circumstances of the actual encounters between Portuguese and Africans) to a racial one is that the binarism between Portuguese imperial subject and subjugated other reassumes pride of place in the second chapter, which treats such encounters in more full-fledged fashion.

“Expansion and the Contours of Africa” examines the geographic and nautical writings that contribute to establishing the so-called “Portuguese discursive regime on Africa” in the period prior to Camões’s...