Loving Nature in João Guimarães Rosa: The Non-human as 'amável'

In the present article, I locate an implicit environmentalism JoãoGuimarães Rosa’s writing from the 1950s and 1960s. This sensibility is easy tomiss, in part because it transposes political debates on damage inflicted in thename of development and progress onto the affective-ethical plane; however, itdoes so in a way that resists sentimentality or projecting a misplaced innocenceonto the non-human world. Focusing on emotional relationships between humansand non-humans, I read “As margens da alegria” and “Os cimos” as expressingan eco-critical discourse that was already latent in Grande sertão: veredas.Recasting the natural world as a site of both unfathomable otherness and relationsof tenderness, Guimarães Rosa presents the emotional hold that nature has onhumans and the cost of cleaving oneself from it—a cost that includes diminishingthe human capacity for delight, wonder, and eros.

A Bridge to Portugal: Language and Identity in Bridgeport, CT

Here I present the results of BridgePORT, an ethnographic study I carried out in 2018 within the Portuguese community of Bridgeport, CT (USA). I describe language use and representation among Portuguese speakers within the community, and I investigate the integration of these speakers into the dominant American English speech community. Through my fieldwork, I observe mixing practices in day-to-day interaction, while I also consider the evolution of the Portuguese language in light of language contact and speakers’ discourse as this relates to ideologies about the status of Portuguese within the community. My findings rely on questionnaires, participant observation of verbal interaction, and semi-structured interviews. My aim is to show how verbal practice shapes the process of identity construction and how ideas of linguistic “purity” mediate the maintenance of a link to Portugal and Portuguese identity.

Baptista, Abel Barros, Clara Rowland, and Pedro Meira Monteiro, editors. Esse Aires. Peixe-Elétrico Ensaios, 2020.

Esse Aires surge em formato eletrónico, reunindo as comunicações do encontrohomónimo lisboeta de 2017 dedicado ao Conselheiro Aires. O título do livro é feliz ao retomar o dístico do capítulo XII de Esaú e Jacó: o pronomedemonstrativo implicando distanciamento e a letra mais sinuosa do alfabetocondizem com a figura enigmática do protagonista machadiano tardio.Personagem autorizada em Esaú e Jacó e autor personificado no Memorial de Aires, o Conselheiro é, como o palíndromo, legível em inversos sentidos. Ambosos romances se pautam, a nível formal e temático, por gestos de apagamento etruncagem.

Imperial Debris: Reflections on the Lisbon Cityscape in Contemporary Portuguese Fiction

This essay focuses on the literary image of contemporary Lisbon. Through an analysis of the anthology Lisbon Tales and Trails (2017) and Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso (2018), I examine how Lisbon’s representation on a global stage exposes the complexities and ambiguities of a metropolitan area deeply connected to the legacies of empire. Moving through fictional texts from the city center to the suburban periphery, I offer a focused reflection on Lisbon’s postcolonial/post-imperial ethnoscape.

Transcendence and Abjection in Vergílio Alberto Vieira’s Cleptopsydra

In the present essay, I examine Portuguese poet Vergílio Alberto Vieira’s 2018 collection, Cleptopsydra, an explicit parody on Camilo Pessanha’s Clepsidra (1920). Within the collection, the poetic voice moves beyond the rigidity of Pessanha’s form through a series of sublime, transcendent, but ultimately earthbound symbols. This tension between form, symbol, and transcendence likewise exists in the work of several of Vieira’s contemporaries, and I suggest an openly transnational and translinguistic link between them. Finally, I discuss how contemporary Portugal has come to serve as both a challenge and a point of articulation for Vieira’s poetics.

Quantas vidas tem Gisberta?: imagem, mídia e arquivo na narrativa contemporânea

In early 2006, fourteen Portuguese teenagers murdered Gisberta Salce, a Brazilian transgender woman, in Porto. A long and emotional criminal trial followed. Since then, several literary and artistic works inspired by Gisberta’s life and tragic death have emerged in both Portugal and Brazil. In the present article, I argue first that these works are intertextually related; I then show how they are connected through a contemporary artistic, social, and political ecology. At the center of this ecology—besides the image of Gisberta herself—is the complex relation between art, technology, and media in a digital world marked by a rapid transnational flow of information and new modes of archival design.

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.

Recitações: Bandolim de Adília Lopes

Borrowing the notion of “projet d’ensemble” from Roland Barthes’s Critique et verité, this essay proposes a critical analysis of Adília Lopes’s Bandolim (2016). Two of the procedures that configure the book’s interior are outlined on the cover: text as sound and text as image. The metaphor of the mandolin and its performative demands relates to Eliot’s ideas about tradition and individuality and describes Lopes’s approach to poetry. Through a close reading of poems in the collection, I argue that Bandolim performs on the infinity of unity while representing the unity of infinity.

Elizabeth Bishop's Brazil: An Attraction in Difference

The correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop during her years in Brazil with fellow poet Robert Lowell shed light not only on her personal impressions and experience there but also on the broader atmosphere of Brazil in the 1950s and 60s. The abundant letters show an intimacy that Bishop was willing to explore in personal correspondence that was not readily forthcoming in her published poetry. The present essay analyzes that correspondence alongside the few poems Bishop wrote in or about Brazil to understand her pursuit of belonging and happiness that found an unlikely home—and a tragic end—in and around Rio de Janeiro for almost twenty years. Bishop’s trajectory from love to loss and happiness to tragedy intimately interacts, this essay argues, with changes in midcentury Brazil, from the national development pursued by Vargas and Kubitschek, including the building of Brasília, to the fallout from the 1964 military coup and beyond.

You Can’t Kill a Kianda: A Reading of Pepetela’s “Magias do Mar”

In the present essay, I analyze “Magias do Mar,” a short story published in 2017 by Angolan writer Pepetela. Drawing from the Angolan myth of Kianda, a mythological creature believed to be the goddess of the ocean, Pepetela’s narrative evokes animism in a manner that parallels Harry Garuba’s observations on contemporary African thought. I reflect on Garuba’s work and examine how animism in “Magias do Mar” works to challenge colonial and modern Western epistemologies and practices. Of particular interest is the narrative’s reflection on the extermination of African wildlife through hunting. I conclude by arguing that Pepetela’s use of animism in “Magias do Mar” has significant implications for postcolonial ecocritical analysis.