This article reads a selection of Cam & otilde;es's sonnets in dialogue with queer theory but informed by philology. It suggests that there are still problems of interpretation in sonnets that are regularly anthologized and around which there is a seemingly critical consensus. By pointing to the limits of what we know when reading these poems, this article brings out in Cam & otilde;es's work its openness to diverse desires and its attunement to varied sexual practices and dispositions, which have been overlooked amid the highly conventional language of sixteenth-century poetry and critics' focus on the sonnets' deep intertextuality.
Portuguese fado has existed as an expression of working-class life in central Lisbon as well as within the various artistic modes of social critique, serving as a parody of social and political narratives. In many cases, fado songs parody each other in what we may characterize as a metaphorical, sociopolitical chain of evolving, critical dialogue. This study focuses on two recent fado songs: Gisela Jo & atilde;o's 2013 "(Casa das) Mariquinhas"- a parody of the 1930 "Casa da Mariquinhas"-and its own subsequent parody, titled "Hostel da Mariquinhas" (2023), also performed by Gisela Jo & atilde;o.
This essay aims to analyze both selected chronicles and the novel Whites Can Dance Too, by Kalaf Epalanga, an Angolan musician and writer based in Europe. The guiding thread of the analysis is the way in which Epalanga discusses, in these different textual genres, the situation of African immigrants in Europe, passing through several places (Berlin, Lisbon, Rygge) and experiences, and Europe's reaction to their presence. To this end, I situate Epalanga's writing within the scope of what has come to be called Afropean and Afropolitan literature (Pitts and Mmembe), introduce terms he uses (p & oacute;s-negritude and polinegritude), and discuss some key episodes of the novel based on theoretical and philosophical texts from postcolonial studies (Appiah and Giuliani).
This article focuses on Clarice Lispector's novel A cidade sitiada at the micropolitical level and discusses how the author represents environment and mood, and the individual's location in an assemblage of material conditions such as the process of modernization and the involvement in an ephemeral social grouping. By analyzing the politics of affect manifested in the circulation of collective optimism, the production of shared promises and desires, and the individual's homogenized gesture of affirming the institutional tenets, the article examines the subject's never-ending process of emerging out of the preindividual and becoming conscious. Through the juxtaposition of the individual's material entanglement in an evolving geographical space with her condition of being interlocked in the contingent collective ambience, Lispector theorizes about the materiality of affect resisting the distinction between social relations and the meshwork of nonhuman objects.
Este ensaio aborda os escritos de Ana Plácido e Anna Emília Ribeiro e algumas representações populares dessas mulheres, que entraram para a história literária luso-brasileira menos como autoras que como adúlteras. Plácido foi amante e depois esposa de Camilo Castelo Branco. Ribeiro foi esposa de Euclides da Cunha até a morte dele num duelo com o amante dela. Examino o tratamento da escrita, do adultério e da mulher transgressora nas “Meditações” de Plácido e nos diários de Ribeiro, destacando também representações delas em telenovelas do fim do século XX e início do XXI. Proponho que, para as escritoras, o adultério representa uma salvação perante o casamento indesejado e uma insubordinação que liberta um poder criador. Esse poder é, porém, posteriormente reinscrito na ordem patriarcal através da prisão, marginalização e submissão das mulheres aos amantes tornados maridos.
In Memoriam: Journeys through the Lusophone Transatlantic Matrix: Essays in Memory of Fernando Arenas
This article proposes an interpretation of Virgindade inútil: Novela de uma revoltada (1927) by Ercília Nogueira Cobra as a counternarrative of the nation. The novel provides an opportunity for a revisionist reading of Brazilian modernity and modernism based on the author’s radical critique of prescriptive notions of gender and sexuality in the process of articulating the country’s national identity in the early twentieth century. This article demonstrates that Virgindade inútil constitutes a counterpoint to the dominant national ideology, dismantling its foundational formation, the heteropatriarchal family, and inaugurating another order by introducing a familial arrangement composed of two women and their daughter. In Cobra’s narrative, the transgression of established gender roles intersects with the subversion of heteronormative sexual morality, enabling us not only to broaden our understanding of Brazilian modernism but also to imagine another Brazil, in which freedom is born of women.
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.
O presente artigo analisa a receção a Deus-dará, de Alexandra Lucas Coelho, e a As doenças do Brasil, de Valter Hugo Mãe, à luz do conceito “sujeito implicado” de Michael Rothberg. Ao expor os laços genealógicos que unem Portugal e o Brasil no tempo longo da história colonial portuguesa, Deus-dará constrói um olhar implicado sobre as narrativas de memória coletiva. Argumenta-se que, ao contrário da receção académica, a receção não-académica portuguesa reverbera o desconforto coletivo perante a necessidade de nos reconhecermos enquanto sujeitos implicados na história e o estado de negação generalizado em Portugal perante rasuras seletivas nas narrativas de memória. Pelo contrário, a análise da receção não-académica a As doenças do Brasil reflete o acolhimento a uma narrativa que nem compromete o silêncio coletivo face aquelas rasuras seletivas nem o facto de as narrativas de memória colonial estarem assentes em percursos honrados de heróis masculinos.
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.
Eça de Queiroz’s short story “Singularidades de uma rapariga loira” represents a breakthrough both in mode of narration and in subject. Distancing himself from idealizations of romantic love, Eça constructed a narrative that attempted to sustain his vision of modernization, colonialism, and their impact on affective life. To my knowledge, readings of “Singularidades” have so far entirely overlooked its allegory of Portugal’s colonialism, and its silencing postures, especially regarding the slave trade. The past of Macário, the story’s protagonist, in the South Atlantic is often dismissed; in my reading, it is an essential aspect of the story’s innovation. Paying attention to Macário’s past also allows one to uncover Eça de Queiroz’s layered storytelling style and opinions on colonialism.
Scenes from an African Lisbon: Selected Chronicles from O angolano que comprou Lisboa (por metade do preço)*
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.
Rezola, Maria Inácia. The Portuguese Revolution of 1974–75: An Unexpected Path to Democracy. Liverpool UP, 2024.
Written and directed by Black filmmaker Viviane Ferreira, the 2014 short film O dia de Jerusa and the 2020 feature film Um dia com Jerusa explore material and symbolic elements of Black culture in São Paulo’s Bixiga neighborhood, a space typically associated with Italian culture in dominant cultural imaginaries. Drawing from work in cinema studies, urban geography, and Black feminist philosophy in Brazil, I examine how Ferreira seeks to recuperate Bixiga as a Black territory in São Paulo by centering the experiences of Black women in ways that challenge the stereotypical representation of Black communities in Brazilian cinema. Through close analysis of the aesthetic differences that change the tone and meaning of scenes adapted from the short film into the feature film, I examine how Ferreira makes visible the shared experiences of Afro-descendant communities creating a cinematic territory articulated through Black subjectivity and film aesthetics.
