This captivating tale is told in two parts. The first presents Lidia Jorge's version of a traditional story about a series of supposed incidents set in Beira, Mozambique. The events take place in the final years of Portugal's colonial African wars as an undisclosed narrator describes the military wedding of a young Portuguese ensign and an equally young bride. The wedding is followed by the mass poisoning of hundreds of native Africans and the arrival of a rain of locusts. The story ends grimly with the groom's suicide. Evita Lopo, the unnamed bride from the first part, narrates the remainder of the story. Twenty years have gone by and she reviews the past and questions the unidentified narrator's rendering of events in the first section. Evita's reminiscences destroy the credibility of the earlier story, and she supplies the reader with a great deal of information that the author of the previous account had suppressed or to which he or she merely alluded. It becomes apparent that betrayal and guilt have motivated all of the characters' actions.

The Portuguese fiction that awakened public debate on imperialism The colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau in the 1960s and 1970s were Portugal's Vietnam. The novels discussed in this study, written by António Lobo Antunes, Lídia Jorge and Manuel Alegre among others, aroused passionate responses from the reading public and initiated a national debate, otherwise lacking in the contemporary press, with their systematic deconstruction of the rhetoric of patriotism and colonialism of António Salazar's regime. The author's approach is of necessity grounded in postcolonial thought, as these works represent the awakening of a post-imperial conscience in Portuguese literature and society. ISABEL MOUTINHO is a Lecturer in Spanish and Portuguese at La Trobe University, Australia.

Within the cultural and literary context of contemporary Portugal and Western literature, 1998 was unquestionably the year that Portuguese writing gained international recognition as JosU Saramago became the first Portuguese writer ever to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. Readers who had never thought about Portuguese letters began to consume his books and, most importantly, opted for expanding their reading lists to include other important writers not only from Portugal, but from Portuguese-speaking well beyond the borders of Portugal. Global Impact of the Portuguese Language is a collection of Portuguese writing that is as rich in content and broad in scope as the diversity of its topics and writing modes of its contributors. The book is divided into three major parts. Part 1, "Different Cultural Perspectives of Portuguese Writing," contains thirteen chapters in which the first and opening one, "Portugal: The New Frontier" ably sets the stage for the book by examining from a cultural perspective how Portugal, a peripheral country in the new world system, serves as a microcosm of the problems of cultural intercommunication in today's world. Subsequent chapters are grouped in three categories: "The Voices of the Writers," "Critical Approaches to Cames," and "Fictionalizing the Nation." Part 2, "Portuguese Language and Literature Outside Portugal," comprises one section devoted to the Portuguese language in Africa, followed by studies about Portuguese discoveries as part of the historical process of remembering and forging one's identity, and finally a comprehensive historical development of Portuguese writing, both in Portuguese and English, in the United States. Part 3, "Portuguese Literature and Criticism Available in English: Suggested Readings" details the recent literary happenings which point to a possible renaissance in Portuguese literary production. The concluding part of this volume offers a short, comprehensive listing of anthologies, general studies, and the most popular translations of the best of Portuguese writing from Portugal and Africa. This lively volume constitutes a first pioneering effort to contribute to a deepening appreciation and understanding of Portuguese writing. Anyone interested in ethnic writing will find this book an invaluable education resource with which to begin an exploration of Portuguese writing in the United States. Asela Rodriguez de Laguna is associate professor of Spanish and director of the Hispanic Civilization & Language Studies Program. She is the author of Notes on Puerto Rican Literature: Images and Identities: An Introduction, and editor of Images and Identities: The Puerto Rican in Two World Contexts.

Some of the most compelling theoretical debates in the humanities today center on representations of sexuality. This volume is the first to focus on the topic -- in particular, the connections between nationhood, sex, and gender -- in the Lusophone, or Portuguese-speaking, world. Written by prominent scholars in Brazilian, Portuguese, and Lusophone African literary and cultural studies, the essays range across multiple discourses and cultural expressions, historical periods and theoretical approaches to offer a uniquely comprehensive perspective on the issues of sex and sexuality in the literature and culture of the Portuguese-speaking world that extends from Portugal to Brazil to Angola, Cape Verde, and Mozambique. Through the critical lenses of gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, and postmodern theory, the authors consider the work of such influential literary figures as Clarice Lispector and Silviano Santiago. An important aspect of the volume is the publication of a newly discovered-and explicitly homoerotic -- poem by Fernando Pessoa, published here for the first time in the original Portuguese and in English translation. Chapters take up questions of queer performativity and activism, female subjectivity and erotic desire, the sexual customs of indigenous versus European Brazilians, and the impact of popular music (as represented by Caetano Veloso and others) on interpretations of gender and sexuality. Challenging static notions of sexualities within the Portuguese-speaking world, these essays expand our understanding of the multiplicity of differences and marginalized subjectivities that fall under the intersections of sexuality,gender, and race.

Until recently, the story of African film was marked by a series of truncated histories: many outstanding films from earlier decades were virtually inaccessible and thus often excluded from critical accounts. However, various conservation projects since the turn of the century have now begun to make many of these films available to critics and audiences in a way that was unimaginable just a decade ago. In this accessible and lively collection of essays, Lizelle Bisschoff and David Murphy draw together the best scholarship on the diverse and fragmented strands of African film history. Their volume recovers over 30 'lost' African classic films from 1920-2010 in order to provide a more complex genealogy and begin to trace new histories of African filmmaking: from 1920s Egyptian melodramas through lost gems from apartheid South Africa to neglected works by great Francophone directors, the full diversity of African cinema will be revealed.

This wide-ranging collection of essays elaborates on some of the most pressing issues in contemporary postcolonial society in their transition from conflict and contestation to dialogue and resolution. It explores from new angles questions of violent conflict, forced migration, trafficking and deportation, human rights, citizenship, transitional justice and cosmopolitanism. The volume focuses more specifically on the gendering of violence from a postcolonial perspective as it analyses unique cases that disrupt traditional visions of violence by including the history of empire and colony, and its legacies that continue to influence present-day configurations of gender, race, nationality, class and sexuality. Part One maps out the gendered and racialized contours of conflict zones, from war zones, prisons and refugee camps to peacekeeping missions and humanitarian aid, reframing the field and establishing connections between colonial legacies and postcolonial dynamics. Part Two explores how these conflict zones are played out not just outside but also within Europe, demonstrating that multicultural Europe is fraught with different legacies of violence and postcolonial melancholia. Part Three gives an idea of the kind of future that can be offered to post-conflict societies, defined as contact zones, by exploring opportunities for dialogue, restoration and reconciliation that can be envisaged from a gendered and postcolonial perspective through alternative feminist practices and the work of art and their redemptive power in mobilizing social change or increasing national healing processes. Though strongly anchored in postcolonial critique, the chapters draw from a range of traditions and expertise, including conflict studies, gender theory, visual studies, (new) media theory, sociology, race theory, international security studies and religion studies.