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

Moorings, Josiah Blackmore's latest monograph, is an outstanding, highly original contribution to our understanding of Portugal's imagination of Africa. Consisting of three chapters and an introduction, Moorings begins with medieval formulations of the Moor, weaving together a string of texts that cast light on Portugal's fantasy formulation of the African continent. Covering the spectrum from Gomes Eanes de Zurara, the fifteenth-century royal court's chronicler, to Luís de Camões, the national bard, Blackmore deploys his impressive erudition to tease out what "Moor" meant in the development of an imperial discourse and how Africa came to be constructed in the Portuguese, and by extension, early modern European psyche. This immensely readable study draws its reader along with an intelligent, but never overpowering, dose of theory and with superlative and innovative interpretations of key texts from the period. Always contextualizing, Blackmore's study begins with a profound interrogation of the etymological roots of Moor(ing), foregrounding, from the outset, the ideological underpinnings of the incipient rhetoric of empire and expansion. As Blackmore ably demonstrates throughout his study, even texts that may appear merely technical, such as the rutter travel logs (roteiros) that were often the textual counterpart to the Portuguese expansion, reveal much about the birth of a colonizing mindset and the predispositions and prejudices that informed them.

The first chapter draws on a range of medieval cantigas to explore the concept of the medieval Moor. Interesting and well informed in and of themselves, these readings serve as the backdrop for an interrogation of the complexity of race in Zurara. Blackmore, entering into dialogue with Edward Said's Orientalism and answering Barbara Fuch's call to develop theoretical tools relevant to a historicized understanding of the early modern roots of European imperialism, traces the shifting nature of the conceptual and geographical boundaries of moorishness, as well as the variegated degrees of race projected onto the African continent by early Portuguese narrators.

The second chapter, the longest in the book, is an invaluable reference for any scholar interested in the biased nature of the prose sources that informed Camões's epic Os Lusíadas. Drawing further on Zurara and reading him alongside the Venetian Alvise Cadamosto, João de Barros, Diogo Gomes de Sintra, Álvaro Velho, Damião de Góis, and Fernão Lopes de Castanheda among others, Blackmore explores the diverse and yet always imperially charged textual mapping of Africa by several generations leading up to Camões. Documenting the experiential accounts as well as the versions drafted in the imaginations of their authors, Blackmore shows how Africa operated as both a space of imperial endeavor and as a symbolic representation justifying that undertaking. Subject to definition and redefinition, the continent and its inhabitants repeatedly are suffused in a thinly veiled ideology in which accurate accounting is secondary to imperial projections. This is one of the crucial aspects of Blackmore's argument, and it enables him to produce a very cogent analysis of Camões. As he throws the "historical" sources of Camões's epic under a very sensitive spotlight and demonstrates the degree to which these applied a biased poetic license, Blackmore shows us the extent to which propaganda operated in the Portuguese empire from the first colonial encounter. Blackmore carefully distinguishes this kind of propaganda machine from Said's nineteenth-century orientalism. While seeing similarities, Blackmore underlines the experiential elements of the Portuguese accounts. Unlike French orientalist activities, the Portuguese propaganda texts do not predate and prevalidate an occupation. Rather, they retroactively justify the imperial endeavor as preordained.

The later part of Moorings focuses more on Os Lusíadas. Blackmore provides perceptive readings of Camões's use of strangeness, the gaze, and imagination, reading them alongside Zurara's depictions of these concepts. Then, in the third and final chapter of the book, he turns his attention to one of the most enduring creations in the Portuguese imaginary: Adamastor, the...