Journal of Lusophone Studies

Journeys through the Lusophone Transatlantic Matrix

2024-07-20T23:50:35-07:00

In Memoriam:

Journeys through the Lusophone Transatlantic Matrix: Essays in Memory of Fernando Arenas

Ambíguas experiências e vivências

2024-07-20T23:50:00-07:00

A Mulher foi sempre, desde os primórdios da literatura africana, presença assídua na construção identitária, tanto como objecto de amor romântico, de encantamento nativista, de desejo e prazer quanto como sujeito marcado pela diferença. Mesmo na produção poética anticolonial a mulher ganhou estatuto de símbolo, com imperativos ideológicos, sem espaço para o sentir individual e muito menos o saber-sentir, afinal a dimensão que consagra o cultural, uma vez que o Nós se sobrepunha ao Eu, mesmo na poesia de autoria feminina (Mata). E, embora decantadas pelos objectivos da escrita, as imagens que projectavam o sujeito feminino estavam tão vinculadas à terra, à nação e à comunidade transnacional...

Made in Brazil

2024-07-20T23:50:23-07:00

The present essay analyzes the emergence in Brazil at the turn of the 1960s of a postcolonial idea of a transnational “community” of Portuguese speakers. That idea is connected with a series of heterogenous and unequal groups linked by different degrees of activism against Portuguese colonialism. Examples include Brazil’s diplomatic turn to Africa and Asia under the Quadros-Goulart regimes; solidarities between African independence fighters and Brazilian Black activists (and supporters); the wide anti-Salazar and anticolonial activism promoted by the exiled Portuguese democratic opposition; and the cultural common sense, echoed by Maria Archer, that Brazil could safeguard the future of the Portuguese language owing to the ever-present history of slavery.

“Alas! A Woman That Attempts the Lens”

2024-07-20T23:50:06-07:00

In 2021, Margarida Gil’s debut longa metragem, Relação fiel e verdadeira was finally released on DVD by the Academia Portuguesa de Cinema, thirty-four years after it premiered. In 1987, it had met with a predominantly negative critical reception from the mainstream press, an unfortunate fate for a film that was not only pioneering for its subject matter and cinematography but was also Portugal’s first screen adaptation by a woman director of a female-authored text. This article explores some of the dominant questions surrounding the gender politics of Gil’s film and women’s position in Portuguese cinema culture in the early 1980s. I argue that the film reterritorializes the literary adaptation genre, which was a mainstay of national (male-authored) heritage on screen, not least through the ways in which Gil uses mirrors and reflections to install, and empower, a resistant and interrogatory feminine perspective in key images and scenes.

Cartas para Angola

2024-07-20T23:50:17-07:00

This article examines the documentary Cartas para Angola (2011) directed by Julio Matos and Coraci Ruiz. The documentary has as its leitmotif the correspondence exchanged between a set of people whose lives are traced between Angola, Brazil, and Portugal. Taking as a point of departure the notions of home and belonging and in dialogue with Fernando Arenas’s work, I investigate people’s relationship to places, expanding earlier conceptions on the ways places work to create a web of meanings in people’s lives. I argue that the existence of hybrid locations enables us to interrogate essentializing paradigms around notions of home and nation, exploring some of the tensions that characterize life in a globally interconnected world.

Scenes from an African Lisbon

2024-07-20T23:50:11-07:00

Scenes from an African Lisbon: Selected Chronicles from O angolano que comprou Lisboa (por metade do preço)*

Fernando Arenas, intérprete da música cabo-verdiana

2024-07-20T23:49:48-07:00

O objetivo principal deste ensaio é prestar uma homenagem à palavra em discurso de Fernando Arenas, em que sou eu o mediador, logo, o interlocutor privilegiado. Por isso são muitos os exemplos, como (1) um tributo à sua língua de cultura e à sua linguagem de criação, quer dizer, ao seu estilo de composição aos pares, em que duas palavras ou expressões combinam-se pelo sim e/ou pelo não, crítica e dialeticamente; registro que expõe, em suma, um modelo, um “paradigma binário” (Arenas), em estado permanente de tensão, ora tem termos contidos, ora em termos mais expansivos, e (2) como um tributo às suas imagens, o modo como Arenas interpreta textualmente letras e/ou poemas do cancioneiro cabo-verdiano.

Fevered Returns

2024-07-20T23:50:41-07:00

This article examines the portrayal of Indigenous people and the environment through film in Brazil. A Febre, the 2019 Brazilian film written and directed by Maya Da-Rin, tells the story of a Desana man, Justino, who lives in the Amazonian city of Manaus and works as a security guard at a cargo port. As the film progresses, Justino experiences an intermittent fever with dreams and visions that call him back to his village in the forest. Modernity becomes a disease that pushes Justino to seek a closer relationship with nature. As a meditation on modernity and Indigeneity, the film reveals the toll of capitalism and the possibility of a return to nature. The film uses Indigenous concepts, specific to the heritage of the actors, and grounded in perspectivism, to move the plot forward. This article explores how the film uses Indigenous concepts to question the unequal processes of Brazilian modernity.

A revolução pelo amor

2024-07-20T23:50:47-07:00

The rise of the far-right in contemporary Brazil has led to a sociopolitical reality characterzied by violations to human rights and threats to democracy in the country. Amidst this conjuncture, Brazilian Popular Music, historically marked by a tendency to be a constitutive discourse, that is, to “indicar maneiras de pensar e viver” ‘indicate ways of thinking and living’ in Brazilian society (Costa 23), becomes an important instrument of protest. The present article looks into how Afro-Brazilian singer and songwriter Chico César’s latest album, O amor é um ato revolucionário (2019), can be considered a protest album against Brazil’s current sociopolitical situation, thus contributing to the continuing status of Brazilian lyric-musical discourse as constitutive in the twenty-first century.

Social Hope in Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star

2024-07-20T23:49:54-07:00

In this essay I will show how the political intelligibility of The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector does not depend on the ability to get reality right. I will argue that Clarice Lispector is able to persuade us to imagine a different future for our society through aesthetic rather than representational means. My argument emphasizes that, although representation is indisputably important, this fact should not lead us to the temptation of rejecting certain books simply because they come from the top of the social ladder and are within the discourse of power. It is my contention that plenty of these books are not just rife with contempt and silence. They can also offer—albeit by other means—equally powerful and significant instruments to engage with pressing political issues.

Entre o dito e o escrito

2024-07-20T23:49:36-07:00

Even today, when they are regaining more space in the media it remains a practice to assume that the lack of publications by women in general is a result of an alleged inactivity on their part instead of the existence of a system that controls and reduces the possibilities for them to gain access to privileged spaces. In the case of afro-Brazilian women the issue is exponentially complicated due to the legacies of slavery and racism. However, the absence of publications is not proof of idleness or meager artistic value. Women always produced artistic texts, even if they did not reach an established public.

“Cadê meu anzol?”

2024-07-20T23:49:42-07:00

In the third section of Torto arado by Itamar Vieira Junior, an encantada, an Afro-Brazilian spirit being, takes over as narrator; her name is Santa Rita Pescadeira. Torto arado depicts the struggle of twentieth-century tenant farmers, and some critics, identifying the novel as one concerned with social justice and agrarian reform, find fault with the encantada’s intervention, understanding it as a “magical” solution. I argue that the book’s third section is not an escape into mysticism. Torto arado takes place—and here I borrow terminology from Christina Sharpe—in the enduring “wake” of the Middle Passage, in the “still unfolding aftermaths” of slavery. I approach the figure of Santa Rita Pescadeira as a powerful example of Herbert Marcuse’s conceptualization of the return of the repressed.

FAGOCITOSE

2024-07-20T23:49:24-07:00

FAGOCITOSE: de Platão à Ecocrítica

Maria Raimunda's War

2024-07-20T23:49:30-07:00

Translation of "A guerra de Maria Raimunda"

Lopes de Barros, Rodrigo. Distortion and Subversion: Punk Rock Music and the Protests for Free Public Transportation in Brazil (1996–2011). Liverpool UP, 2022.

2024-07-20T23:50:29-07:00

Rodrigo Lopes de Barros