Lusophone geopolitical space: vidas em Português

Análise Social, 2019

Revista de Estudos Literários, Universidade de Coimbra, 2017

2000

Lusophony is the highly intricate construct we intend to interrogate. It is a geo-linguistic space, that is, dispersed regions, countries and societies whose official language is Portuguese (Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East-Timor, Guinea Bissau, Portugal, S. Tomé and Príncipe). It is also a sentiment, a memory of a common past, a shared culture and history. In addition to its symbolic patrimony, Lusophony integrates institutions attempting to expand the Portuguese language and inter-related forms of cultural expressions.

Análise Social, 2019

Análise Social

2004

Lusophony is the highly intricate construct we intend to interrogate. It is a geo-linguistic space, that is, dispersed regions, countries and societies whose official language is Portuguese (Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East-Timor, Guinea Bissau, Portugal, S. Tomé and Príncipe). It is also a sentiment, a memory of a common past, a shared culture and history. In addition to its symbolic patrimony, Lusophony integrates institutions attempting to expand the Portuguese language and inter-related forms of cultural expressions.

Lusotopie, 2005

This piece examines the historical construction of a Lusophone cultural-linguistic media space and market that spans portions of Europe, Africa, and South America. Beginning with the Portuguese colonization of Brazil and Lusophone Africa in the 17th century and continuing to the contemporary moment, our discussion examines how a combination of political, ideological, and economic patterns created linkages between Portugal, Brazil, and Portuguese-speaking colonies in Africa (namely Angola, Cape Verde, and Mozambique). After examining how Brazil grew to become the dominant cultural producer in this transnational matrix (most explicitly expressed through the massive exports of telenovelas and music since the late 1970s), we examine how other countries are beginning to carve out distinctive national niches, including the contemporary music scene in Cape Verde and the rise of domestically produced telenovelas in Portugal and Angola that are increasing in circulation in the contemporary transnational Lusophone media space.

This study interrogates a series of utopian projections that have informed Portuguese and Luso-African letters and culture since the Renaissance. Concentrating on the three crucial historical moments – Portugal’s tenuous hegemony in the Asian seas in the sixteenth century, the collapse of its colonial empire in the mid-1970s, and the post-independence period of re-evaluating nationalisms in Africa – the study examines the familiar “long narrative” which casts the Portuguese Discoveries as an inaugural and enabling event in Europe’s conquest of the world. In the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts, a sense of belatedness and danger in the face of a vast commercial network which preceded by several centuries Portugal’s arrival in Asia undercuts this account. The narratives about Portugal’s colonial wars in Africa negate the Salazarist project to restore the mythologized age of discoveries and seek simultaneously to converge with anti-colonial guerrilla movements. The work of António Lobo Antunes eschews this trend, insisting instead upon the incommensurability between the liberation struggles and Portugal’s April Revolution. Concomitantly, recent Lusophone African literature pictures the struggle of liberation as a cancellation of historicity, and underscores the “differend” between official constructions of nationhood and the future imagined from below. Reviews “This boldly designed and splendidly executed inquiry into discourses of colonial and postcolonial experience in the Portuguese-speaking world merits a readership as wide and varied as is the scope of its author’s interests and expertise. Dr. Madureira moves with ease and elegance over the vast territory of Portuguese, Brazilian and Lusophone-African literatures, historiography and criticism from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first ... This is comparative literature at its best – and one can only hope that readers from outside the usual-suspects circle of academics specializing in Luso-Afro-Brazilian studies will recognize it as well.” – Professor Anna Klobucka, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth “Madureira’s Imaginary Geographies manages, in all its referential complexity, and against all odds, to interweave a series of diverse theoretical perspectives from a number of cultural traditions to make a critical rethinking of an interconnected world in continual, ongoing semantic transition possible—especially given that this world, whether in Portuguese or any number of other languages, continues both “narratives of discovery and empire” and, just as importantly, narratives of resistance and alternative cultural agency.” – Prof. Christopher Larkosh, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for Ellipsis: Journal of the American Portuguese Studies Association

The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (JLACA), 2021

This article examines the frequently expressed desire among people of the Xingu Indigenous Territory living in the city of Canarana, Brazil, to learn Portuguese. It examines such statements of intent, which are typically presented as a reason for indigenous urban migration. I argue that the desire to learn Portuguese is itself in need of investigation, to which end I turn to two Upper-Xinguan Carib myths and a conversation at the headquarters of the Xingu indigenous land association. The indigenous presence in urban spaces offers evidence of the ways in which place serves as a perspectival stabilizer for them, in a world where perspective determines the body's form and, by extension, ontology. Based on long-term fieldwork and the application of a technique of ethnographic imagination, adapted from Strathern, the article demonstrates how modulation of the tongue is a means of preserving autonomy in relations with Whites and a survival strategy. [Indigenous urbanization, Amerindian perspectivism, Xingu Indigenous Territory] R e s u m o Este artigo propõe uma análise do desejo recorrentemente anunciado pelos parquexinguanos de ir para a cidade para aprender o português. O objetivo é iluminar esta afirmação indígena, que figura na bibliografia etnológica como razão para o deslocamento indígena para os centros urbanizados. Argumento que o desejo de aprender português requer, ele próprio, investigação, o que faço a partir da referência a dois mitos