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Under Our Skin by Jethro Soutar, Joaquim Arena is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Under Our Skin about?

1570: A street teems with activity in Renaissance Lisbon: boatmen unload passengers as jugglers entertain the crowd and vendors hawk their goods. The crowd is large, and more than half of it is Black. Most are enslaved African people performing an array of duties, but there are free Africans too, and somebody else: a Black knight astride a horse. Four hundred and fifty years later, novelist and journalist Joaquim Arena stands in a museum, transfixed by the character depicted on this canvas by an anonymous Flemish painter. He doesn't know it yet, but the knight is Joao de Sá Panasco, a one-time slave who nevertheless became an Afro-Portuguese nobleman. So begins Under Our Skin , a wide-ranging investigation that seeks to know the people of the early African diaspora, and tell their stories. Arena was born in the tiny state of Cape Verde, a small chain of islands off the West Coast of Africa which were uninhabited before Portugal chose them for a slave-trade post—a place made famous in part by Herman Melville's essay on the nature of Cape Verdeans (known as 'Gees') who were common fixtures on whaling vessels. With this awareness, Arena creates a hybrid text of travel writing, memoi

Author

Jethro Soutar, Joaquim Arena

Publisher

The Unnamed Press

Published

2023

Language

EN

ISBN

9781951213527

Subjects

Political Science, Literary Fiction, Social_sciences

Rating

4.4 / 5 (102 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14