The thesis Cities in transit: culture, conflict and power in the Atlantic area of the Portuguese language investigates literary and cinematographic productions from the Portuguese speaking countries of the Atlantic area- Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde and Portugal -representing urban reality as a place of conflict, stimulating a reading of violence and power relations intrinsic to the contemporary experience in the light of the many continuities with a past marked by colonial and slavery exploitation of the bodies. The comparative approach that underlies the analysis of the selected corpus, appropriate with the plurality of the works and contexts examined, proposes a critical essay that, in conceptualizing the notion of endo-colonialism as a characteristic of the act of power in the contemporary world, highlights the complexity and multiplicity of the ways through which violence and racism come to join the urban reality, giving continuity to the submission of bodies and to the fragmentation of the territory, dynamics which were implemented during the colonial and slavery era. In light of the intrinsic differences in each context being analysed and always considering as a starting point the many ties that literary texts build with the urban space, after the first chapter of theoretical nature, which observes the multiple relations between power and capital, the following parts making up the research convene a heterogeneous conceptual repertoire: Giorgio Agamben s considerations about the stasis, namely about the civil war as a political paradigm, are alternated with to those of Michael Foucault on bio power, to those of Achille Mbembe on necropolitics and to the reflections of various other authors concerning political affections. These analyses, combined with detailed investigations into the urban contexts of the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic, allow us to draw an analytical account of the persistence of colonial and slavery logic in urban contemporaneity.