Magazines from Macao and Literature in Portuguese in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

The literary production in the periodical press in Portuguese from Macao is a vast but poorly known corpus, and most of the authors who contributed to it at the beginning of the twentieth century are very little known, if not altogether unknown. This essay focuses on two literary and cultural magazines: Oriente. Revista Mensal (1915) and Macau. Semanário Artístico, Literário e Social (1918–19), to assess whether they represent any move towards a recognition of a Portuguese-language Macau as a space of cultural and literary awareness. Even though the first is a Catholic and conservative publication and the second shows a republican-anarchist ideological background, they share local authors and themes. However, in these magazines we do not find the formation of local literary movements, indigenous to Macao, but rather the voices of dislocated Portuguese intellectuals and writers, and their orientalizing view. Even so, it will be argued that it is precisely this that can, in this same period, characterize what constitutes Macao Literature in Portuguese and that perhaps this concept has to be reread in order to also include this reality.