Lusophone Studies Research Articles

Erica Dantas Brasil (1969–2022)

Erica Dantas Brasil (1969–2022) Adam Sharman Language students have very particular expectations of teachers who are from the country whose language they’re studying. As far as students are concerned, such teachers don’t just teach the country’s language; they represent the country. They are ambassadors. In Erica’s case, she didn’t represent a bit of the country; she was the entire country. It was official, it was her name. She was Erica Dantas Brasil. And what a job she did being Brazil in Nottingham for more than twenty years, first under the umbrella of the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies (SPLAS), and latterly under that of the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures. Erica was born in the Brazilian Atlantic port city of Fortaleza in 1969, that is, at the height of the military dictatorship. Her family then moved from the northeast to the south of Brazil in the early 1970s as part of that wave of mass migration to the cities. She was educated principally in São Paulo, where she obtained a BSc in Psychology at the Catholic University, in 1992. In 1994, she completed an MA in Psychology at the State University of São Paulo. Then, in 1998, she won an award from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to do an MA in Social Work in the School of Law and Social Sciences here at the University of Nottingham, which she completed in 1999. A year later, she won a scholarship to do a PhD in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies (i.e. SPLAS) in Nottingham. The thesis, which was on Foster Care, was awarded in 2010. The dates tell a story. It was the practice in SPLAS in those days to give PhD students a fees waiver in return for some teaching. Erica was thus a Graduate Teaching Assistant in Portuguese Studies for the first four years of her PhD, before becoming the full-time co-ordinator of the Portuguese language programme in 2004. In other words, she held down a full-time teaching position while doing her thesis. As Coordinator of Portuguese Language, she built a formidable team, training and mentoring colleagues; she developed on-line language exchanges between Nottingham students and students in Brazil; and she dedicated herself to undergraduates with passion and patience. In 2021, her dedication and talent [End Page v] were recognized with a Lord Dearing Award for Excellence in Teaching. She set up internships for our students with a Translation and Interpreting company in São Paulo, and helped establish placements in two British Council partner international language schools in Brazil. In Argentina, she negotiated training for students in the area of advocacy with RELAF, an International NGO dedicated to children’s rights on whose Consultative Committee she sat. Erica was an active researcher. She presented her work in the field of Children’s Rights in Latin America at international conferences. She published articles, book chapters and translations. And she became co-researcher on a project in the History Department of the Federal University Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, funded by the Brazilian Funding Agency, a project that entailed interviewing women who had been involved in armed struggle during the Brazilian dictatorship of the 1960s and ’70s. Beyond SPLAS and the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, Erica served the University on high-level delegations to Latin America. She was a member of the University’s Latin American Regional Advisory Network, with responsibility for fostering collaborations with Brazilian institutions. And in recognition of her outstanding contribution, Erica was promoted to Assistant Professor in Portuguese in 2018. But even without all the achievements outlined above, which include ongoing active participation in Nottingham’s vibrant Brazilian community, it would be enough to single out Erica’s role at the heart of Lusophone Studies in the University. For more than two decades, she helped inculcate in countless undergraduate students a profound love for all things Portuguese and Brazilian. She more than lived up to her name. Erica Dantas Brasil passed away in July 2022, and is much missed by friends, family and colleagues in the UK, Brazil and beyond. [End Page vi] Adam Sharman Professor...

Feminine Singular: Women Growing Up through Life-Writing in the Luso-Hispanic World ed. by María José Blanco and Claire Williams

Reviewed by: Feminine Singular: Women Growing Up through Life-Writing in the Luso-Hispanic World ed. by María José Blanco and Claire Williams Nuria Capdevila-Argüelles Feminine Singular: Women Growing Up through Life-Writing in the Luso-Hispanic World. Ed. by María José Blanco and Claire Williams. (Iberian and Latin American Studies: The Arts, Literature, and Identity) Bern: Peter Lang. 2017. xiv+369 pp. £37. ISBN 978–3–03–430836–6. This collection of essays, edited by María José Blanco and Claire Williams, originates from an international conference held in London at the former Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies in May 2011. Since then, the momentum that had been building since the 2000s has translated into an exponential growth in interest in life-writing within Hispanic and Lusophone Studies. With reference to the Peninsula, this has been particularly pronounced in the context of Memory Studies. The present volume thus contributes to a rich field of feminist and historical enquiry, perhaps not as well known as it should be to Anglophone audiences, but definitely not new. The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait, for example, was first published by Bloomsbury Publishing in a facsimile bilingual edition in 1995. In the mid 1980s the late Biruté Ciplijauskaité based her analysis of female-authored novels on the certainty that we were heading towards ‘una tipología de la narración en primera persona’, as indicated by the subtitle of her 1988 book—La novela femenina contemporánea (1970–1985): hacia una tipología de la narración en primera persona—published by Anthropos. She obviously meant a typology of life-writing and, in effect, anticipated the title and broad canvas of the edited collection under review. Then, particularly in the 1990s, the so-called Peninsular New Narrative captured Anglophone attention. Within it, life narratives were key. Laura Freixas, one of the contributors to Feminine Singular, was at that time one of these new voices, scrutinized by critics and academics. The generational connection to auto-fiction was widely discussed. Blanco and Williams solidly continue in this venerable tradition by bringing together ‘essays on life-writing ranging from the cloistered lives of seventeenth-century nuns to memoirs of living clandestinely during the Portuguese dictatorship, to pseudo-autobiographical twentieth-century fiction’ (p. 27). The fifteen essays are divided into six sections: Cloistered Lives, Diary Writing, Memoir and Confessions, Poetry, Fictional Auto/biography, and Visual Biographies. The frontispiece of the book reproduces a painting by Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, showing her palette and brush. In truth, the image represents a form of lifewriting, and one with a clear precursor: the self-portraits by Madrid-born painter Marisa Roësset (1904–1976), who repeatedly painted herself painting, thus reproducing many versions of her authorial subjectivity and also of her palette, either [End Page 136] whole or fragmented. She gave these out to friends, or else exchanged them. Male authors tend to be less generous or more protective of their authorship. Roësset’s Autorretrato tumbada en el suelo (Self-Portrait Lying on the Floor, 1927) should come to mind on seeing Vieira da Silva’s piece. Only it does not, only it cannot. Because what Feminine Singular foregrounds is a broken genealogy—a situation it helps to remedy. Pepa Anastasio’s piece on performer Julia Fons (1887–1973) (pp. 287–310) is a case in point. It reminds us that the impulse to record one’s life has been strong enough to widen the gap between high and popular culture, thus forcing us critics to overcome it and resort to hidden archives and new materials to trace, bring to light, and better understand the development of life-writing in the Luso-Hispanic world, an area as large and influential as its Anglophone counterpart. The essays in this volume, contributed by important authors such as Anna Caballé and the aforementioned Laura Freixas, identify women who have shaped their sense of self via diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, travel writing, poetry, painting, drawing, collage, scrapbooks, and other artistic forms. Ultimately, the aim of these ‘I’s, as the editors and contributors remind us, is always not only to represent themselves...

Transnational Portuguese Studies ed. by Hilary Owen and Claire Williams

Reviewed by: Transnational Portuguese Studies ed. by Hilary Owen and Claire Williams Mark Sabine Hilary Owen and Claire Williams, eds, Transnational Portuguese Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020). xxiv + 386 pages. Print and ebook. The responsibility shouldered by contributors to Liverpool University Press's Transnational Modern Languages series should not be underestimated. By gathering a multi-perspectival corpus of scholarship on cultural traffic that focuses on the permeability of borders, and acknowledges the multi-layered and intersectional nature of purportedly unitary ethnic identities, the series hastens the overdue embedding of the 'transnational turn' in a discipline founded—like it or not—in the epistemology of cultural nationalisms and colonialism. As Hilary Owen and Claire Williams assert in their cogent introduction to this volume, the challenge that transnational research methodologies present to the 'conflation of language, territory and identity' upon which the study of Modern Languages was originally predicated offers 'a transformative means of re-thinking' the pedagogic, social and political agency of the modern linguist (p. 5). It offers this, one might add, at a time when the value of a multilingual practice of scholarship, and of cultural analysis more generally, is increasingly scorned or contested. The current 'boom' in transnational enquiry responds to and informs both contestation of the hegemony of Eurocentric and often racist models of research and cultural value, and the demands of an increasingly multipolar world order. The studies Owen and Williams have gathered justify their contention that research subsumed under the rubric of Portuguese or Lusophone Studies offers especially 'powerful and engaging possibilities' for 'Modern Languages as transnational cultural enquiry' (p. 6). Portuguese Studies' status as a discipline has been determined by the language's global diffusion—centuries before the age of nationalism—and by its historical and geographical proximity to Spanish. Consequently, it has long presented as 'always already requiring a multiply-hyphenated "transcultural" and "transnational" methodology' (p. 7), even as its practitioners have, paradoxically, claimed a discrete 'national-looking' language base, so as to resist conflation with Spanish, or 'Hispanic', Studies. [End Page 99] Moreover, for some decades, historians examining Portugal's colonial expansion have foregrounded how that project's fragility—in the face first of established African and Asian empires, and later of ascendant European rivals—often engendered intricate repartitions of economic and political power that, in turn, brought forth new or hybridized cultural practices and identities. If Portuguese Studies' longstanding examination, and frequent celebration, of hybridities and transculturation qualifies it to offer leadership to sibling Modern Language disciplines, however, its practitioners also need to confront the legacy, in Portugal and elsewhere, of a 'dynamics of ignorance' about all things extra-national promoted by isolationist authoritarian regimes, as Ellen W. Sapega notes (p. 223) in a timely and meticulous study of Portuguese memorialization of the Second World War. They need also acknowledge—as Anna Klobucka's reading of Gilberto Freyre's quasi-anthropological travelogue Aventura e Rotina reminds us (pp. 50–56)—how imperialist, racist and (European) male-supremacist preconceptions and metanarratives often linger within the purview of linguistic and cultural scholarship, even when scholars identify Lusophone communities as inherently transculturated, and their task as inherently translational. Of the volume's four themed sections—'Spatiality', 'Language', 'Temporality' and 'Subjectivity'—the first two present transnational approaches to their titular concepts that are particularly effective for countering imperialist or exceptionalist narratives of a 'Portuguese-speaking world'. Zoltán Biedermann's 'Global Navigations and the Challenge of World-Making' opens up the ideological loading of 'unquestioned […] spatial notions' (p. 24)—'territory', 'nation', 'expansion'—that have long underpinned representations of Portugal's imperial enterprise as a 'linear process of diffusionist-cum-universalist power-building' (p. 40). Biedermann's call for an excavation and acknowledgment of early-modern Portuguese subjects' attraction to and interaction with 'powerful, prosperous and self-confident' extra-European cultural centres (ibid.), and the substantial input of these into the cultures and praxis of colonial and postcolonial world systems, is echoed in José Lingna Nafafé and Toby Green's fascinating critique of the concept of lusofonia, tracing the roots of an instrumentalization of language for imperialist ends back to the writings of Padre António Vieira, but revealing the extent...

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography by Pamila Gupta

Portuguese Studies vol. 37 no. 2 (2021), 256–68© Modern Humanities Research Association 2021 Reviews Pamila Gupta, Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). 225 pages. Print and ebook. Reviewed by Paul Melo e Castro (University of Glasgow) A recent growth area in postcolonial studies has involved what one might loosely describe as ‘oceanic perspectives’. The attractions are obvious, in that such perspectives effectively provincialize Europe as one point in a network of exchanges and allow for a renovation of existing topics by recovering interconnections between former colonial spaces that a more national(ist) focus might occlude. Given that the bulk of Portuguese speakers are located around the South Atlantic and that a significant number, if not the majority, are of at least partial African descent, it is no surprise that Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic paradigm of a ‘counterculture of modernity’ emerging in the wake of the middle passage has provided the main inspiration within Lusophone Studies. Lately however, as attested by such works as Fernando Rosa’s The Portuguese in the Creole Indian Ocean (2015), among various articles and research projects, interest has also grown in how Isabel Hofmeyr’s countervailing Indian Ocean paradigm — in which processes of exchange long predate colonial modernity, even if increased and then informed by it — might bring about studies of the peripheral, less integrated, even residual eastern territories of the former Portuguese empire, stretching from Mozambique to India and onwards to Timor Leste. It to this emergent debate that Pamela Gupta’s Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World contributes, asking some searching questions of an original variety of ethnographic materials and historical junctures yet equally showing the risks that working across such a broad scope may entail. GuptahasdoneasignificantamounttointroducetheIndianOceanparadigm, being inter alia one of the editors of Eyes across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (2010). The present work collects a series of articles written subsequently and linking Angola, South Africa, Mozambique and Goa through the lens of decolonization, which the author pegs to two dates: 1961, when Goa was annexed by India, and 1975, when Angola and Mozambique achieved independence after the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. While 1975 is uncontroversial, whether 1961 represented decolonialization or recolonialization is a tricky subject, as the various debates put forward by Goa’s Al-Zulaij Collective show. One of this book’s main points of interest is the wide variety of subjects it traverses, taking in references to the work of Ryszard Kapuściński, Mia Couto and Ricardo Rangel alongside the life stories of the Goan fishing community of Catembe and White Portuguese Africans who left Angola and Mozambique Reviews 257 for South Africa. Decolonization becomes a way of discussing the messiness of lives that continued through traumatic breaks in the historical timeline. The section on ‘retornados’ (if I can bend the meaning of this word so much, though many of the ‘retornados’ to Portugal were hardly returning there either) in South Africa is fascinating, the most interesting in the book for me. We see how this exodus, which has been given less attention than the high-profile flux of Whites to Portugal, was driven by a complex mix of self-identification as white Africans and the desire to preserve the prestige that colonial status brought. The fine-grained discussion of these lives is neatly complemented by the inclusion of photographs by Ricardo Rangel detailing the 1975 settler exodus from Lourenço Marques, adding a contrasting viewpoint to the memories of the interviewees. The section on Goans in Mozambique is equally interesting, the interviewees’ recollection of their ambivalent entanglements with whiteness and blackness exemplifying what Cristiana Bastos, quoted, calls their ‘floating position’. When problems arise, it is often in point of detail and partly through the cursory treatment given some issues. Here for brevity I focus on two subjects I know something of. Can we simply discuss Ricardo Rangel’s photographs as ‘visual metaphors’? Does the analysis of such documentary photography not have to engage with its claims on reality as trace or metonymy? What proof is there that many of Rangel’s colonial-era photographs were destroyed by the Portuguese colonial state, rather than their publication simply...

The Locations and Relocations of Lusophone Studies

The Locations and Relocations of Lusophone Studies

Intersections of Empire, Post-Empire, and Diaspora: De-Imperializing Lusophone Studies

The present article opens with a generic plea for the de-imperialization of Lusophone studies. A de-imperial turn should allow researchers to explore more thoroughly the experiences of diaspora and exile that an empire-centered history and its spin-offs have obfuscated; it should also help to de-essentialize depictions of Portuguese heritage and culture shaped by these narratives. Such a turn promises to address the multiple identifications, internal diversities, and racialized inequalities produced by the making and unmaking of empire. My contribution consists of a few ethnographic-historic case studies collected at the intersections of empire, post-empire, and diaspora. These include nineteenthcentury diasporic movements that brought Portuguese subjects to competing empires; past and present celebrations of heritage in diasporic contexts; culture wars around representations; and current directions in post-imperial celebrations and reparations.

Lusophone Studies: A Cumulative Area Bibliography, 2017–19

Lusophone Studies: A Cumulative Area Bibliography, 2017–19

Lusophone Studies: A Cumulative Area Bibliography, 2017–19

Portuguese Studies vol. 36 no. 1 (2020), 67–95© Modern Humanities Research Association 2020 Lusophone Studies: A Cumulative Area Bibliography, 2017–19 Emilce Rees King’s College, London The following pages list publications and doctoral theses relating to the Portuguese-speaking world which were published from late 2017 to mid-2019 in English. Some MA theses have been included and some 2016 publications. Online academic databases have been used, namely the Copac(r) library catalogue, WorldCat(r), the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Database and the British Library EThOS for theses produced by UK Higher Education. The Copac(r) library catalogue contains the merged online catalogues of major University, Specialist, and National Libraries in the UK and Ireland, including the British Library. ABIL (Association of Portuguese and Irish Lusitanists) list members are also thanked for their contribution. WorldCat(r) is a global catalogue with over 2 billion items available from libraries around the world. I. Publications 1.1 Anthropology, Ethnography and Folklore 1.2 Arts, Architecture and Music 1.3 Bibliographies, Directories and Guides 1.4 Environment 1.5 History, Politics and Social Science 1.6 Language 1.7 Literature 1.8 Religion II. Theses 2.1 African Topics 2.2 Asian Topics 2.3 Brazilian Topics 2.4 Portuguese Topics Bibliography 68 I. Publications 1.1 Anthropology, Ethnography and Folklore ANDERSON, Warwick, Ricardo ROQUE & Ricardo VENTURA SANTOS (eds), Luso-Tropicalism and its Discontents: The Making and Unmaking of Racial Exceptionalism (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019), 346 pages. BALL, Christopher Gordon, Exchanging Words: Language, Ritual, and Relationality in Brazil’s Xingu Indigenous Park (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press/SAR Press, 2018), xiii, 274 pages. BEACH, Dennis, Carl BAGLEY & Sofia MARQUES DA SILVA, The Wiley Handbook of Ethnography of Education (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2018), xvii, 574 pages. COSTA, Luiz, The Owners of Kinship: Asymmetrical Relations in Indigenous Amazonia (Chicago, IL: HAU Books, 2017), 304 pages. COSTA VARGAS, João Helion, The Denial of Antiblackness: Multiracial Redemption and Black Suffering (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 352 pages. DA-GLORIA, Pedro, Walter A. NEVES & Mark HUBBE (eds), Archaeological and Paleontological Research in Lagoa Santa: The Quest for the First Americans (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017), xvi, 401 pages. DE LA TORRE, Oscar, The People of the River: Nature and Identity in Black Amazonia, 1835–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 242 pages. GONZÁLEZ VARELA, Sérgio Armando, Capoeira, Mobility, and Tourism: Preserving an Afro-Brazilian Tradition in a Globalized World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 184 pages. KUTESKO, Elizabeth, Fashioning Brazil: Globalization and the Representation of Brazilian Dress in ‘National Geographic’ (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019), xv, 197 pages. MITCHELL, Gladys L., The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), xvi, 266 pages. MURPHY, Timothy Eugene, Queerly Cosmopolitan: Bohemia and Belonging in a Brazilian Middle-of-Nowhere City (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), xiv, 157 pages. OLIVEIRA-MONTE, Emanuelle K. F., Barack Obama is Brazilian: (Re)Signifying Race Relations in Contemporary Brazil (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 226 pages. PASCHEL, Tianna S., Becoming Black Political Subjects: Movements and EthnoRacial Rights in Colombia and Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 328 pages. SHULIST, Sarah, Transforming Indigeneity: Urbanization and Language Revitalization in the Brazilian Amazon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), xiv, 241 pages. VARELA, Sérgio González, Power in Practice: The Pragmatic Anthropology of Afro-Brazilian Capoeira (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017), 182 pages. Bibliography 69 1.2 Arts, Architecture and Music ALLEN, Alice Louisa, Shifting Horizons: Urban Space and Social Difference in Contemporary Brazilian Documentary and Photography (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2017), 284 pages. ANTUNES, Joana, Maria de Lurdes CRAVEIRO & Carla Alexandra GONÇALVES, The Centre as Margin: Eccentric Perspectives on Art (Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2019), xxxii, 330 pages. BABAIE, Sussan & Melanie GIBSON, The Mercantile Effect: Art and Exchange in the Islamicate World during the 17th and 18th Centuries (London: Gingko Library, 2017), 143 pages. BAMFORD, Heather, Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100–1600 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), xi, 257 pages. BAYMAN, Louis & Natália PINAZZA, Journeys on Screen: Theory, Ethics, Aesthetics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), xii, 304 pages. BENNETT, Andy & Paula GUERRA, DIY Cultures and...

Fernando Arenas (1963-2019)

The untimely death of Fernando Arenas on October 30, 2019 has left his partner, mother and brothers, who were by his side at the time, with much pain and an indescribable sense of loss. For his colleagues, his death is a major loss in Lusophone Studies, the field that he helped to forge with unrelenting conviction, generosity and kindness. As I share the outline of a memory that others will want to fill-in, I mourn a close friend and colleague of more than two decades without whom life in Minnesota will never be the same.

Anti-Empire: Decolonial Interventions in Lusophone Literatures by F. Daniel Silva

Reviewed by: Anti-Empire: Decolonial Interventions in Lusophone Literatures by F. Daniel Silva Débora Zamorano Silva, F. Daniel. Anti-Empire: Decolonial Interventions in Lusophone Literatures. Liverpool UP, 2018. Pp. 319 ISBN 978-1-78694-100-8. Anti-Empire: Decolonial Interventions in Lusophone Literatures is a ground-breaking attempt to explain Portuguese imperialism through a more extensive interpretation of imperial power. The study explores different literary works from different Lusophone places and periods during the last century, such as Cabo Verde, Brazil, Portugal, and others. The works enable the reader to understand the political contexts in which the texts were written, as well as their opposing views about the Empire and forms of decolonization that such works provide. According to Silva, decolonization generates the reconstruction of eroding indigenous life. The book encourages the reader to reflect upon anti-imperial awareness and meaning. As Silva points out, "the works explored thus far in this volume have, in different ways and through different approaches, grappled with Empire's signification of time, space, and bodies, confronting imperial taxonomies of human life, while offering interrogations of the performance of subjectivity in relation to power" (237). One of the book's strength is the examples of decolonization it provides in the first six chapters, which contain reflections about topics such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and others. A good illustration of this is the author's elucidation on Mario and Oswald de Andrade's version of Antropofagia and its post-discourse, which touches upon the Brazilian myth of racial democracy, existent in Brazil until this day and age. The arguments are well-rounded and make it simple for the readers to perceive the struggles between the colonial power and the decolonial projects that attempted to object to the dominant forms of power and challenge them. Another interesting example Silva shows of decolonization is through Olinda Beja's work. In her first collection of poetry, Beja describes her trajectory as an African girl who migrates to Europe. In her poem "Visão," Beja demonstrates how the European elites transformed her into an European girl so that she could be accepted in this new society. A riveting example of her transformation relates to her physical and cultural changes. Beja's poetry certainly offers reflection on Empire's dominance and decolonization. Another highlight is certainly the "Transgendering of Jesus" through the work of Mario Lucio Souza, where the figure of Jesus embodied as white masculinity walks the earth in the body of an elderly African woman. Through this literary work, the author provides the reader with different forms of knowledge in relation to issues such as power and masculinity. Anti-Empire is an informative book that provides an understanding of important factors that led to anti-imperial thoughts in Lusophone countries via scholarly texts from different literary movements. The book is rich and enlightening both in terms of its literary aspects and the alternatives they propose for decolonization, and thus the idea of a more inclusive society. The study explores texts from different twentieth-century colonial contexts and provide precise and pertinent reflections on decolonial alternatives to imperial culture, history, politics and knowledge. However, there is more information that the author could have included to enrich the book even more. For example, Silva could have provided more details about the process [End Page 628] of independence in Angola, which was not as smooth as it was in other Lusophone nations. Therefore, it would be interesting to see a sequel of this book with more decolonial reflections through different texts and facts. This study is extremely relevant and of interest for anyone who researches about Lusophone countries literature and their political and historical contexts, as well as decolonial forms of knowledge. The book is enlightening, easy to understand and presented in a logical manner. In addition, it certainly provides an important contribution to the field of Lusophone studies and their post-colonial historical, cultural and economic issues. Débora Zamorano University of Texas at El Paso Copyright © 2020 Middlebury College Publications

Transnational and Counternational Queer Agencies in Lusophone Cultures: Introduction

This special issue of the Journal of Lusophone Studies was devised with the aim of addressing issues of (nonnormative) gender and (queer) sexuality in relation to travel, translation, transnational friendships and relationships, posturing and imitation, contagion, promiscuity, and other related themes across the spectrum of modern Luso-Afro-Brazilian literatures and cultures from the nineteenth century onward. Collectively, the editors and contributors are particularly interested in considering the ways in which queer subjectivities and agencies have counteracted triumphant versions of the nation and nationalism that seek to foreclose any alternatives to patriarchal and heteronormative fictions of progress and homogeneous identity.

The presence of Lusophony in the epistemic field of Communication Sciences: 10 years of themed studies

Drawing up a survey of publications on lusophone themes in the field of Communication Sciences over the last 10 years (2007-2017) has made it possible to describe that scientific production and find that it has been increasing in volume. This scientific production is feminised and focuses on two voices, where Portugal and Brazil take on a predominant role, which contrasts with the state of citations in the field in general. Based on the themes examined, Lusocom emerges as the great think tank for Lusophone Studies in the Communication Sciences field. “The presence of Lusophony in the epistemic field of Communication Sciences” is an exploratory, descriptive study that takes a quantitative-qualitative approach, covering a sphere that comprises the conference proceedings of Sopcom, Ibercom and the Anuário Internacional de Comunicação Lusófona published by Lusocom. Of the total of 3.252 articles found, a sample of 142 were chosen, selected by theme, to form the basis for this study.

A not so common idea

This article focuses on autobiographies of Portuguese emigrants in the USA published outside the literary circuits (A different and longer version of this analysis will be published by The Journal of Lusophone Studies in October 2016). The analysis draws from material collected during fieldwork in New Jersey, where a surprising number of migrant’s written self-portraits were found. The paper examines such works as an expression of self and social (biopolitical) empowerment in contrast with the established negative image associated to the figure of the Portuguese emigrant. The four considered authors emigrated in different periods of the 20th Century marked by continuous Portuguese emigration flows. Escaping misery, poverty, the colonial war, or lack of perspectives, these e/immigrants were improbable authors from the outset, yet, motivated writers of their memories and life experiences. The analysis highlights the heuristic value and social relevance of such autobiographies both in their socio-anthropological meaning, and as historical portraits of Portugal and the Portuguese emigration.
 [Project funded by the Fulbright Commission/Camões Institute and hosted by the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Brown University, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Rutgers University, under the 2013 Fulbright Program for PhD researchers and professors].

Theorizing Masculinity in the Context of Luso-Afro-Brazilian Culture

This special issue of the Journal of Lusophone Studies explores the multifaceted ways that masculinities are performed and embodied throughout the Portuguese-speaking world. The articles presented here interrogate the concept of masculinity to understand better how the arts engage with and participate in rethinking masculinities. While this volume focuses specifically on expressions of masculinity within the Lusophone world, these articles also broadly engage with questions related to masculinities studies by revealing how, within the Portuguese-speaking world, writers are questioning, destabilizing, and in some cases reifying the concept of masculinity.

Lusophone Studies: A Cumulative Area Bibliography, 2015–17

Lusophone Studies: A Cumulative Area Bibliography, 2015–17

Exploring the Neither in João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata’s A última vez que vi Macau

Torn between two colonial powers, Macau has long existed as a peripheral region in Lusophone studies. This current study explores João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata’s 2012 film A última vez que vi Macau. With a focus on a contemporary Macau that seeks to resolve its fundamental duality through investigation of gender, film style, and geography, the current study also considers the inherent conflict present in any once colonized location.

Lusophone Studies: A Cumulative Area Bibliography, 2015–17

Lusophone Studies: A Cumulative Area Bibliography, 2015–17

Emigration and the Sea: An Alternative History of Portugal and the Portuguese

Malyn Newitt has produced a compelling new work of scholarship, important for its innovative framing of Portuguese history on a global scale by exploring the multiple ways that, since initiating the era of European overseas expansion in 1415, a Portuguese demographic and cultural diaspora has influenced and contributed significantly to world history. The book has a novel approach, describing global Portuguese impact through complex patterns of immigration over six centuries. Newitt’s writing is strong (though the book’s organization is oddly nonchronological); his highly erudite narrative showcases the author’s decades of teaching and writing related to this subject. From 1998 to 2014 Newitt was a professor of history in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at King’s College, London. His prior publications focus on the colonial era in the Indian Ocean, particularly the Portuguese in Mozambique.Emigration and the Sea opens with a consideration of recent historiographical trends and theories regarding the role of emigration in world history, followed by two chapters that explore emigration patterns from continental Portugal and the Atlantic Islands (the Azores and Madeira) from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Having laid this groundwork, Newitt examines in eight successive chapters the diaspora of Sephardic Jews from Portugal; Portuguese patterns of migration to Asia and Brazil; Portuguese emigration in the twentieth century, across Europe, and to various destinations in the Americas; and Portuguese emigration to Africa. A brief final chapter, “The Portuguese and the Sea,” considers the cultural diasporic significance of Portuguese fishing fleets in the northwest Atlantic.While valuable for its fresh vision and analytical parameters, the book offers a quirky and sometimes uneven analysis—one inevitable result, perhaps, given the broad, long perspective created by a senior scholar drawing on a lifetime of research. The narrative often relies on a device unusual for scholarly historical works—throughout the text Newitt quotes impressions provided by fictional literary sources as illustration and evidence rather than presenting actual experiences recounted in primary sources. Surprisingly, the publication lacks maps to orient the reader; this is an unfortunate oversight in a work meant to explain demographic movement between points on the globe that are unfamiliar to students in most Anglophone countries.Some lapses in the investigative fabric of the book are difficult to understand. For example, while discussing the Portuguese diaspora in the United States Newitt makes no mention of the substantial community based in New Jersey. He uncritically repeats as plausible the discredited Portuguese origin story to explain the reclusive Melungeons of Appalachia (210), ignoring definitive genetic research disproving an Iberian link. Similarly, Newitt offers an uncritical perpetuation of the myth of Pedro Francisco, a Revolutionary War hero supposedly of Portuguese descent, despite having no evidence of note supporting this claim. And what logic justifies including a detailed consideration of Cape Verdean immigration patterns in the United States but not in Paris, all the while failing to mention the comparable role of Brazilian communities settled across North America?Newitt ends his book very abruptly, with no analytical conclusion. While readers will find much here to enrich their understanding of Portugal’s impact on the world—Newitt’s contribution is undoubtedly useful as a teaching text for Lusophone studies—one hopes that subsequent editions may clear up some of the substantial matters of concern raised here.

Língua Portuguesa: formação docente e educação pré-escolar em contexto timorense

Desde o período da Administração Transitória das Nações Unidas em Timor-Leste diversos são os programas de cooperação do Brasil e de Portugal para a difusão e ensino da Língua Portuguesa (LP) naquele país. É o caso, por exemplo, do Programa de Qualificação Docente e Ensino de Língua Portuguesa em Timor-Leste, promovido pela Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior. Nesse sentido, na confluência das áreas de Educação (numa perspectiva freireana) e dos Estudos Lusófonos, após breve contextualização da situação da LP em Timor-Leste (no período colonial e durante o domínio indonésio), este artigo, com base em memoriais elaborados pelos participantes do Curso de Português Instrumental (CPI), inserido no Projeto de Ensino da Língua Portuguesa Instrumental, analisa alguns aspectos do trabalho realizado no âmbito desse Curso dirigido a professores da pré-escola de Díli. Destacam-se, aqui, a percepção dos educadores quanto à contribuição do CPI e às atividades propostas, visando tanto a fluência na expressão em português quanto, e principalmente, uma produtiva prática pedagógica e o processo de conscientização dos docentes em relação à necessidade do domínio da Língua Portuguesa.

Migrations and the Rise of African Lisbon: Time-Space of Portuguese (Post)coloniality

Portugal is arguably the European nation with the longest experience with “colonialism” in a variety of configurations, historical moments, and geographical contexts. Yet, given its perennially peripheral status from a geopolitical and economic standpoint, the Portuguese (post-)colonial experience has not been an object of attention outside of the field of Lusophone Studies. This essay provides a brief historical overview to understand the breadth and depth of the Portuguese (post)colonial experience; offers a conceptual map of Portuguese postcoloniality where ideologies of affect and exceptionalism such as Lusotropicalism play a key role; highlights the centrality of immigration for an understanding of Portuguese society — particularly African immigration and its nexus with the history of colonialism and racism that reverberates in national debates around race, ethnicity, and interculturality; provides a brief account of the rise of an Afro-Portuguese culture; and presents short readings of Portuguese cinematic texts that exemplify ethical and aesthetic praxes bringing marginalized black subjects to the center of representation in the quest for social and cultural citizenship.