A collection of innovative and insightful essays providing a critical and theoretical reflection on the concept and history of Lusofonia

Long before the concept of “globalization,” the Portuguese constructed a vast empire that extended into Africa, India, Brazil, and mid-Atlantic territories, as well as parts of China, Southeast Asia, and Japan. Using this empire as its starting point and spanning seven centuries and four continents, The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora examines literary and artistic works about the ensuing diaspora, or the dispersion of people within the Portuguese-speaking world, resulting from colonization, the slave trade, adventure seeking, religious conversion, political exile, forced labor, war, economic migration, and tourism. Based on a broad array of written and visual materials, including historiography, letters, memoirs, plays, poetry, fiction, cartographic imagery, paintings, photographs, and films, The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora is the first detailed analysis of the different and sometimes conflicting cultural productions of the imperial diaspora in its heyday and an important context for understanding the more complex and broader-based culture of population travel and displacement from the former colonies to present-day “homelands.” The topics that Darlene J. Sadlier discusses include exploration and settlement by the Portuguese in different parts of the empire; the Black Atlantic slave trade; nineteenth-century travel and Orientalist imaginings; the colonial wars; and the return of populations to Portugal following African independence. A wide-ranging study of the art and literature of these and other diasporic movements, this book is a major contribution to the growing field of Lusophone studies.

More than the persistent beat of a song or the structural frame of poetry, rhythm is a deeply imbedded force that drives our world and is also a central component of the condition of human existence. It’s the pulse of the body, a power that orders matter, a strange and natural force that flows through us. Virginia Woolf describes it as a “wave in the mind” that carries us, something we can no more escape than we could stop our hearts from beating. Vincent Barletta explores rhythm through three historical moments, each addressing it as a phenomenon that transcends poetry, aesthetics, and even temporality. He reveals rhythm to be a power that holds us in place, dispossesses us, and shapes the foundations of our world. In these moments, Barletta encounters rhythm as a primordial and physical binding force that establishes order and form in the ancient world, as the anatomy of lived experience in early modern Europe, and as a subject of aesthetic and ethical questioning in the twentieth century. A wide-ranging book covering a period spanning two millennia and texts from over ten languages, Rhythm will expand the conversation around this complex and powerful phenomenon.

Transnational Portuguese Studies offers a radical rethinking of the role played by the concepts of ‘nationhood’ and ‘the nation’ in the epistemologies that underpin Portuguese Studies as an academic discipline. Portuguese Studies offers a particularly rich and enlightening challenge to methodological nationalism in Modern Languages, not least because the teaching of Portuguese has always extended beyond the study of the single western European country from which the language takes its name. However, this has rarely been analysed with explicit, or critical, reference to the ‘transnational turn’ in Arts and Humanities. This volume of essays from leading scholars in Portugal, Brazil, the USA and the UK, explores how the histories, cultures and ideas constituted in and through Portuguese language resist borders and produce encounters, from the manoeuvres of 15th century ‘globalization’ and cartography to present-day mega events such as the Rio Olympics. The result is a timely counter-narrative to the workings of linguistic and cultural nationalism, demonstrating how texts, paintings and photobooks, musical forms, political ideas, cinematic representations, gender identities, digital communications and lexical forms, may travel, translate and embody transcultural contact in ways which only become readable through the optics of transnationalism. Contributors: Ana Margarida Dias Martins, Anna M. Klobucka, Christopher Larkosh, Claire Williams, Cláudia Pazos Alonso, Edward King, Ellen W. Sapega, Fernando Arenas, Hilary Owen, José Lingna Nafafé, Kimberly DaCosta Holton, Maria Luísa Coelho, Paulo de Medeiros, Sara Ramos Pinto, Sheila Moura Hue, Simon Park, Susana Afonso, Tatiana Heise, Toby Green, Tori Holmes, Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá and Zoltán Biedermann.

‘Music Scenes and Migrations’ brings together new work from Brazilian and European scholars around the themes of musical place and transnationalism across the Atlantic triangle connecting Brazil, Africa and Europe. Moving beyond now-contested models for conceptualizing international musical relations and hierarchies of powers and influence, such as global/local or centre/periphery, the volume draws attention instead to the role of the city, in particular, in producing, signifying and mediating music-making in the colonial and post-colonial Portuguese-speaking world. In considering the roles played by cities as hubs of cultural intersection, socialization, exchange and transformation; as sites of political intervention and contestation; and as homes to large concentrations of consumers, technologies and media, Rio de Janeiro necessarily figures prominently, given its historical importance as an international port at the centre of the Lusophone Atlantic world. The volume also gives attention to other urban centres, within Brazil and abroad, towards which musicians and musical traditions have migrated and converged – such as São Paulo, Lisbon and Madrid – where they have reinvented themselves; where notions of Brazilian and Lusophone identity have been reconfigured; and where independent, peripheral and underground scenes have contested the hegemony of the musical ‘mainstream’.

Decolonization represented the end of colonial rule, but did not eradicate imperial and colonial categories and mythologies. Situated in the wider context of European colonial legacies, this book looks at the legacies of the Portuguese empire in today's Portugal. Using an interdisciplinary agenda, with contributions from experts in the fields of history, anthropology, literature, and sociology, the several case studies included in the volume look at a wide range of colonial legacies. These include a set of commemorative practices that feed on imperial mythologies, old colonial and racial classifications that condition citizenship rights, and post-imperial modes of culture consumption. Legacies of the Portuguese Colonial Empire is the first book written so far in English on this topic, enabling the Portuguese case to enter into a broader dialogue with other national experiences relating to the legacies of colonialism and empire in today's Europe.