We see rainbows only when the sun is behind us and the water drops in front of us. Therefore, in the face of the great anonymity of the oceans, rainbows remind us of the specific contours of individual experience and memory. The methodological move proposed in this project privileges the bodies and experiences of black women whose material and temporal situation positions them between the water and the sun. Women who have departed but not arrived, who have spent their lives circulating both physically and imaginatively, and who are consistently neither here nor there: how have their experiences been remembered and imagined, across time and space, by black women and white men who write, theorise and act in Portuguese? Women of the Brown Atlantic provides an innovative set of conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools for addressing this question. It investigates how black women’s experiences of mobility in the Brown Atlantic, from slavery to present times, have been remembered by both black women and white men, in-between African, Brazil and Portugal, with particular emphasis on how the relation between real experiences of mobility and their imagination and theorisation may be traced.