"Isabela Figueiredo's literary memoir Notebook of Colonial Memories was originally published in Portugal in 2009 as Caderno de Memórias Coloniais. It traces the author's growing up in the 1960s and 70s in Mozambique, which was then still a Portuguese colony, and her "return" at the age of thirteen to Portugal (a country she had never seen) following Mozambique's independence. It offers an uncommonly candid and unsparing perspective on the realities of late Portuguese colonialism in Africa and on the political climate surrounding the "repatriation" to Portugal of hundreds of thousands of former colonial settlers, mainly from Angola and Mozambique. The critical introduction by Anna Klobucka and Phillip Rothwell describes these historical circumstances and contextualizes Figueiredo's text for the English-language reader, as well as commenting on the writer's complex exercise of remembrance, reconstruction and fictionalization of her experience in both Mozambique and Portugal. Keywords: Portuguese colonialism, Mozambique, decolonization, postcolonialism, memoir" --

Placed in the wider scope of post-war European decolonisation migrations, The Retornados from the Portuguese Colonies in Africa looks at the "Return" of the Portuguese nationals living in the African colonies when they became independent. Using an interdisciplinary research agenda, the book presents a collection of research essays written by experts in the fields of anthropology, history, literature and the arts, that look at a wide range of memory narratives through which the Return—as well as the experiences of war, violence, loss and trauma—have been expressed, contested and internalised in the social realm. These narratives include testimonial accounts from the so-called retornados from Africa and their descendants, as well as works of fiction and public memory—novels, television series, artworks, films or social media—that have come to mediate the public understanding of this past. Through the dialogue between these different narrative modes, this book intends to explore the interplay between official memory, the lived experience and fiction, thus contributing to build an empirical basis to critically discuss the memory of the end of the Portuguese empire within postcolonial Europe. This book will be of great interest to postgraduates, researchers and academics, most notably the ones working in the fields of postcolonial studies, cultural studies and memory studies.

Sarah De Mul is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) in the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Leuven. Her publications and research interests are in the field of comparative postcolonial studies, with a particular focus on gender, memory, and empire in Neerlandophone and Anglophone literature.

National bestseller 2017 National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Finalist ABA Indies Introduce Winter / Spring 2017 Selection Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Spring 2017 Selection ALA 2018 Notable Books Selection An intimate and poignant graphic novel portraying one family’s journey from war-torn Vietnam, from debut author Thi Bui. This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family’s daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves. At the heart of Bui’s story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent—the endless sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through. With haunting, poetic writing and breathtaking art, she examines the strength of family, the importance of identity, and the meaning of home. In what Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “a book to break your heart and heal it,” The Best We Could Do brings to life Thi Bui’s journey of understanding, and provides inspiration to all of those who search for a better future while longing for a simpler past.

Having built much of their wealth, power, and identities on imperial expansion, how did the Portuguese and, by extension, Europeans deal with the end of empire? Postcolonial People explores the processes and consequences of decolonization through the histories of over half a million Portuguese settlers who 'returned' following the 1974 Carnation Revolution from Angola, Mozambique, and other parts of Portugal's crumbling empire to their country of origin and citizenship, itself undergoing significant upheaval. Looking comprehensively at the returnees' history and memory for the first time, this book contributes to debates about colonial racism and its afterlives. It studies migration, 'refugeeness,' and integration to expose an apparent paradox: The end of empire and the return migrations it triggered belong to a global history of the twentieth century and are shaped by transnational dynamics. However, they have done nothing to dethrone the primacy of the nation-state. If anything, they have reinforced it.

This book deals with the work of twentieth-century women artists and literary authors from Portugal, Brazil and Portuguese-speaking African countries against the backdrop of political dictatorships. The essays in this volume reflect upon and challenge canonical perspectives on the arts and literature, bringing to light some of the hidden and silenced faces of Lusophone culture. By doing so, they highlight how dominant ideologies marked the artistic and literary practices of Portuguese-speaking women, and how these women in turn developed strategies of resistance through their creative work. The volume brings together contributors working in a range of disciplines, including literary criticism, the visual arts, and film studies, all of whom reflect on themes such as the reactions of women artists to authoritarianism, the representations of political repression in their work, the colonial war, and the critical revision of this historical moment by a younger generation of artists. It addresses scholars, critics, students and cultural workers with an interest in post-colonial and feminist studies in the Portuguese-speaking context.

The first volume of critical essays on the contemporary Portuguese novel in English, this book theorizes the concept of the 'hypercontemporary' as a way of reading the novel after its postmodern period. This inquiry into the notion of the hypercontemporary in its literary and cultural articulations analyzes a varied group of works representative of the most vibrant novels published in Portugal since 2000. The editors' introductory chapter theorizes the concept of the hypercontemporary as one way of looking at the novel after its postmodern period – especially in its relation to questions of violence, memory and performativity. These essays show how the Portuguese novel has evolved in the past 25 years, and how, in their diversity, most of these novels exhibit several common traits, including new topics and writing strategies – sometimes developing further entropic lines characteristic of many Postmodern narratives – and themes of violence, rapid transformation, and the many threats to a contemporary world that seems mass-produced due to greater technological advances. Readings also discuss the use of innovative graphic forms available from current print technologies and global networks. The Hypercontemporary Novel in Portugal provides a necessary understanding of the current literary landscape of Portugal and, in the process, the aesthetics of hyperrealism or post-postmodernism.