The Power of Absence —
How Anonymous Rebels, Afro-Futures, and Cannibal Poetics Are Rewriting Empire

In a world obsessed with likes, faces, and personal brands, some voices are choosing to disappear. Not out of fear, but out of intention. The French collective Cases Rebelles has spent over a decade doing just that: writing, recording, and resisting from the shadows. No names. No photos. No applause.

They speak together, and they speak from the margins. Not from Paris or polished studios, but from provincial towns and kitchen tables. Their work is radical not just for what it says, but for how it refuses the rules of visibility. They are a refusal with a pulse. A whispered uprising.

Across the Black Lusophone world — from Lisbon to Luanda to São Paulo — other voices are rising, sometimes loud, sometimes barely audible. Writers, artists, thinkers: they are not asking to be heard so much as refusing to be silenced. Their refusal is not a rejection of culture, but a reconfiguration of it. They do not want to be added to the canon. They want to rewrite the page.

The Static Between Calls

In Lisbon, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida places a mother and daughter on opposite ends of a telephone line. As Telefones, her 2020 novel, doesn’t unfold so much as flicker. Like radio static, it disrupts. A mother in Luanda. A daughter in Lisbon. Their voices traverse the ocean, but what resonates is the space between words. The silences. The missed connections. The ache.

It’s not just a novel about migration or trauma. It’s a novel about the afterlife of empire. The way colonialism doesn’t end with independence, but lodges itself into gestures, cadences, dreams. Pereira de Almeida refuses the neat closure of national identity or the redemptive arc of diasporic reconciliation. Her characters float in a suspended present, connected by cables and memories, but never quite meeting.

The daughter, Solange, speaks of her body as something unknown. Inherited. Dislocated. She cannot see her mother. She cannot locate herself. The phone rings, but even conversation cannot bridge what colonialism has torn. It is a novel of echoes.

And yet it hums with resistance.

This is a new kind of Lusophone literature. One that dislodges the center. One that replaces the colonizer’s voice with a chorus. Pereira de Almeida doesn’t merely tell a story. She rewires the language. Her I is fractured. Her sentences fray. Her memory is oral. Her fiction feels closer to ritual than to reportage.

We Eat What We Must

Meanwhile, in Brazil, resistance has long had its own metaphor: cannibalism. Cultural anthropophagy, famously theorized by Oswald de Andrade in 1928, was not a provocation, but a philosophy. Brazil, he argued, should not mimic Europe. It should devour it. Absorb it. Digest it into something wild, something ours.

"Tupy or not Tupy. That is the question."

Anthropophagy was a ritual. A performance. A method. Indigenous tribes in pre-colonial Brazil consumed their enemies not to destroy them, but to absorb their power. Andrade reclaimed this logic and turned it into a cultural weapon. His manifesto was a battle cry: only by eating the colonizer could Brazil truly be free.

This was not mimicry. This was alchemy.

Modernist Brazil, through anthropophagy, began to unshackle itself from the inferiority complex implanted by empire. Artists, writers, and musicians no longer sought approval from Paris or Lisbon. They turned inward. They mixed samba and Surrealism. Slang and Symbolism. They made beauty out of contradiction.

Futures That Call From Elsewhere

And alongside cannibal poetics, something more cosmic rises — Afrofuturism. Aesthetic, philosophy, survival strategy. It isn’t only the sound of the future — it’s the sound of memory bent forward. Afrofuturism doesn’t ask “what if?” It says “we already did.”

Afrofuturism reclaims time, remixes geography. It’s a circuit board built from myth and migration, wired with longing and prophecy. In Brazil, it pulses through the art of Ventura Profana, who conjures queer Black divinity in the ruins of colonial Christianity. In Portugal, it haunts the hybrid beats of Batida, where kuduro fuses with Lisbon’s concrete soundscape.

Cases Rebelles, too, vibrates on this frequency. Their refusal of authorship isn’t silence — it’s static, deliberate. Their voices are pirate radio signals drifting across linguistic borders, echoing the speculative frequencies of the Black Atlantic. They don’t imagine utopia. They transmit it in pieces, between breath and interference.

Like Djaimilia’s mother and daughter, they remain partially out of reach, speaking across eras and continents, rewriting the script through sound.

Afrofuturism doesn’t belong to one flag or coast. It belongs to the ghost in the machine. To the skipped beat in the archive. To the future that was always there, uninvited.

It belongs to the chorus that cannot be copyrighted.

The Echoes of the South

In the early 21st century, this cannibal logic has returned—but not in the form of modernist manifestos. Now it travels through beats, film reels, zines, social media feeds, and diasporic dreams. It emerges in the work of artists like Rosana Paulino and Ayrson Heráclito, who braid together Afro-Brazilian cosmologies and post-slavery trauma with a force that no longer looks northward for validation.

Today, Brazil is no longer the "younger sibling" of Lusophony. It is the pivot. It is the stage. In what one might call a reconquista invertida, Brazil now reclaims the cultural space that empire once denied it—not through conquest, but through resonance. It becomes the re-inventor of Lusophone aesthetics, its rhythm carried by the drum and the digital, not the crown.

Where Portugal polishes its colonial nostalgia for tourists, Brazil remixes it into future soundscapes. Lusophone Africa, often marginalized in global circuits dominated by Anglophone and Francophone art worlds, finds in Brazil a new center of gravity—one more comfortable with hybridity, more fluent in disobedience.

As scholar and theorist frameworks suggest, the old hierarchy of "Portugal → Brazil → Africa" is flipping. Lisbon no longer dictates the cultural weather. It listens to it coming in waves from Recife, Luanda, Maputo.

Mapping a South Atlantic Matrix

Paul Gilroy spoke of the Black Atlantic—but here, we need something more specific. A South Atlantic matrix. A cultural network of intimacy, rupture, and invention that connects Angola to Bahia, Cabo Verde to Rio, Guinea-Bissau to São Paulo. A map not made by colonial hands, but by rhythm, memory, and shared refusal.

In this matrix, the term "Lusophony" itself begins to stretch. It no longer simply means "those who speak Portuguese." It means: those who survive it, those who subvert it, those who sing in it, and those who spit it out when necessary.

It is in this space that Cases Rebelles finds kin. Not by birthright, but by code. Their podcast microphones are cousins to the telephones in As Telefones, to the drums of Candomblé, to the click of a camera capturing resistance on the margins.

They do not dominate. They circulate.

They do not conquer. They disrupt.

Portugal, Listening

Portugal, meanwhile, finds itself oddly provincial. Not in geography, but in gravity. It is no longer the center. Lisbon’s galleries, universities, and cultural spaces increasingly depend on Brazilian and African art to stay relevant. Brazilian slang spices the language of Portuguese youth. Angolan kuduro thumps in Lisbon clubs.

This is the quiet irony of decolonization: the empire dissolves not with a bang, but with a beat.

Portugal now imports the culture it once sought to define. It curates what once was coerced. It brands Lusophony, but no longer authors it.

And maybe that’s the point. In a truly decolonial future, Portugal does not lead. It listens.

Pop Tropics and the Meme Frontier

And while theory and ritual move beneath the surface, something weirder — and wonderfully chaotic — is happening in full view. Decolonial critique has gone viral. What started in November 2024 as a linguistic spat over the Brazilian expression “fala, galera!” used in the social media announcement of footballer Kika Nazareth's signing to Barcelona’s women’s team, turned into a cultural wildfire. Portuguese users protested the perceived “brasileirismo,” while Brazilian netizens did what they do best: they laughed, remixed, and memed it into the now-iconic concept of Guiana Brasileira.

The meme imagines Portugal not as former empire, but as a wayward territory of Brazil — rechristened with increasingly surreal nicknames: Pernambuco em Pé, Faixa de Gajos, Mato Grosso do Norte. On platforms like TikTok, Bluesky, and X, satirical maps, fake embassies, and alternative national anthems reimagine Lusophone history as speculative farce. Portuguese influencers cried colonial reversal. Brazilian posters replied with memes about “devolving the stolen other” and TikTok videos dubbing Portugal’s capital “LisBrasa.”

What emerges isn’t just a joke — it’s a people’s decolonial theory in motion, wearing carnival masks. Guiana Brasileira turns sovereignty into satire and memory into play. It transforms old wounds into pop theater, where even geopolitics becomes drag. It is the meme frontier of Lusophone futures — Afro-diasporic absurdism, tropical surrealism, and digital resistance all dancing together in 30-second loops.

It’s Afrofuturism with a cracked phone screen. Anthropophagy in meme form. And somehow, the embassy is real. Just look around: it’s already opened inside your browser.

Guiana Brazileira isn’t on the map, but it’s on people’s minds. It borrows the codes of nationhood only to scramble them—border stamps, national anthems, consulates made of recycled fabrics and found dreams. It’s the future imagined as tropical bootleg. It mocks the idea of sovereignty while rehearsing its emotional necessity. In this world, passports are jokes and survival is a genre. Guiana Brazileira doesn't demand recognition—it demands a wink, a nod, a remix.

This is the meme frontier of the Lusophone decolonial shift, where cultural imagination outpaces academic frameworks, and where digital folklore becomes a tool for dissent. It’s Afrofuturism wearing flip-flops. Anthropophagy with a punchline. The embassy is open, and everyone’s a diplomat of the absurd.

A Call You Can't Hang Up

In the final pages of As Telefones, no grand reunion takes place. But something is passed. A signal. A sentence. A breath. That may be all we get. That may be everything.

Because this is not about answers. This is about persistence. The call continues. The hum grows louder. And in that sound—between Afroanarchist refusals, Afrofuturist visions, and anthropophagic joy—a new Lusophone world is being sung into being.

A world without masters.

A world without center.

A world where absence, finally, makes a different kind of presence possible.

And the line? It’s still open.

You just have to listen.