Drawing on Karen Barad's theory of diffraction, this presentation analyzes how Bertina "Mama B" Lopes's compositional strategies and iconographic appropriations exposed the gaps between Portuguese Estado Novo (1936–1974) propaganda and lived reality under its apartheid system. Through formal analyses of works including Le mani sulla città (1958–60) and her gesture drawings for Luís Bernardo Honwana's Nós Matámos o Cão-Tinhoso! (We Killed Mangy Dog!) (1964), Estrela demonstrates how Lopes’s work opposed the racial categories imposed by Portuguese colonialism and its legitimizing ideology of lusotropicalism. Rather than merely reflecting her historical conditions, Estrela argues, Lopes’s practice (rooted in both European fine arts training and indigenous Mozambican artistic forms) modeled a diffractive paradigm of image-making that brought opposing factions and fractured identities into conciliation and exposed the fiction of colonial control as ultimately untenable.

About the Speaker: Dr. Sarah M. Estrela is the Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Associate in Reparative Art Histories. She earned her B.A. at Wheaton College (Massachusetts) and completed her Ph.D. in Art History at Northwestern. Her research focuses on global modern and contemporary art within African (especially Lusophone) diasporic contexts. She specializes in art histories of colonialism, theories of the archive, practices of photography and time-based media, and feminist art histories.

About the Image: A still from Bertina Lopes (1924–2012), Illustration for cover of Luís Bernardo Honwana, Nós Matámos o Cão-Tinhoso! (Lourenço Marques, Mozambique, 1964).