ABSTRACT This article offers the first full-length, theory-driven reading of Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020) at the nexus of post-colonial ecofeminism and Caribbean magical realism. Mobilizing Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies’s ecofeminist critique of patriarchal ownership, Rob Nixon’s ‘slow violence’ and Stephen Slemon’s model of magical realism as post-colonial discourse, the essay argues that Roffey’s mermaid romance re-members Taíno genocide, plantation slavery and neo-colonial extraction through a single hybrid body. Aycayia’s declaration — ‘Land is not to be owned’ — unhinges residual planter hierarchies, while David Baptiste’s epiphanic shift from possession to care rehearses an alternative, relational masculinity. Polyphonic form (Creole diary, Taíno verse, third-person chronicle) constitutes a counter-archive that restores Indigenous and more-than-human voices to Caribbean historiography. The novel’s open ending, in which the merwoman returns to a recuperating reef, models Donna Haraway’s ‘making-kin’ ethics and imagines coral regeneration as a metaphor for social repair. By entwining gendered defiance, ecological memory and mythic method, Roffey crafts an ‘ethic of regenerative refusal’ that reframes Caribbean futures beyond plantation modernity.

ABSTRACT This study analyses two novels, Venea din timpul diez/Coming from an OffKey Time and Miruna, o poveste/Miruna, a Tale, by a writer representative of contemporary Romanian literature, Bogdan Suceavă, a mathematician ‘in love’ with literature, who proposes, in the spirit of non-Euclidean geometry, an innovative writing formula, the ‘non-linear in-between novel’, in which he reveals unprecedented recovering functions of a post-December 1989 Romanian identity.

ABSTRACT Graciete Nogueira Batalha (1925–1992) arrived in Macao in 1949, when there was already a history of local publications dedicated to the study of its creole language. As a high school teacher, Batalha was not expected to do research, but the letters she received from Manuel de Paiva Boléo (1904–1992), her former teacher at the University of Coimbra, encouraged her to write about the Asian city based on her linguistic and socio-cultural observation and perception. The letters, which are held at the Biblioteca Central de Macau, help us to understand the circumstances and motives for conducting scholarly activities. The scientific journal, Revista Portuguesa de Filologia, served as an outlet for such endeavours. Simultaneously, the letters maintained in Coimbra, namely at the Biblioteca da Universidade, allow us to understand the establishment of a mentorship between Batalha and Boléo that went beyond the classroom.

RESUMO Passados cinquenta e dois anos da anexação de Goa à União Indiana, Ave Cleto Afonso (1943) publica O Vaticínio do Swârga (o que Os Lusíadas não canta), uma “resposta” a Luís Vaz de Camões (1524-1580), que na sua célebre epopeia (1572) narrava a viagem de Vasco da Gama à Índia. Desde logo, o autor goês substitui pela mitologia hindu a mitologia greco-romana que enforma os cantos do bardo lusitano. Por um lado, O Vaticínio do Swârga não se saberia ser lido sem o que Tristão de Bragança Cunha chamou ainda na década de 1940 (e mesmo que anacronicamente) de “desnacionalização” dos goeses, processo iniciado com a tomada de Goa por Afonso de Albuquerque em 1510 e encerrado com o regime ditatorial do Estado Novo no século XX. Por outro lado, trata-se de uma obra tributária do “Orientalism from within” típico do nacionalismo indiano dos séculos XIX e XX. Como pensar, então, as literaturas da Ásia para além dos modelos nacionais, considerando-se, sobretudo, o discurso dos próprios autores?

ABSTRACT The first Portuguese translations of Japanese novels date from 1906 and 1909, respectively: Nami-ko (Hototogisu) by Tokutomi Kenjirō (1868–1927) and Os 47 Capitães (Iroha Bunko) by Tamenaga Shunsui (1790–1843). These novels, which mark modern Portugal–Japan literary relations, were published without any identification of their source language. Both translations appeared, however, one year after their Spanish counterparts, which in turn are based on English direct translations from Japanese (Nami-ko, 1904; The Loyal Ronins, 1880). The proximity of publication dates of the Portuguese and Spanish translations, the working languages of the Portuguese translators, and the juxtaposition of peritextual elements between the Portuguese and Spanish translations suggest that the latter may have served as the basis for importing Japanese novels into Portuguese. Framed within the external history of translation and based on a paratextual approach, this case study interrogates the pattern of double indirectness underlying the introduction of the Japanese novel in Portugal. By questioning to what extent neighbouring Spain, as a mediation system, helped shape the openness of the Portuguese literary system to Japanese literature, it will clarify the early twentieth-century relations between the Portuguese and Spanish publishing markets in terms of the influence of the latter on the former.

ABSTRACT This article considers the significance of allusions to Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605–1615) in Sefarad (2001) by Antonio Muñoz Molina. Understanding Cervantes’s novel as a key instance of adaptive imitation, it argues that the narrator of Sefarad also relies on quixotic echoes and narrative patterns reminiscent of Cervantes’s novel in the construction of his narrative. The narrator’s allusions thereby reflect the aesthetic and narratorial practices which he employs in piecing together imagined memories and testimonies of the ravages of twentieth-century European history. Drawing on and extending previous analyses of the continuum of adaptive imitation that exists between the two writers, this article suggests that the echoes of Cervantes’s masterpiece in Sefarad encapsulate and complicate the ambiguities, both aesthetic and ethical, of Muñoz Molina’s narrative. By indicating metaphorical comparisons between both texts, this article reveals heretofore underexplored elements of the aesthetics and the narrative stakes of Muñoz Molina’s novel. To the extent that quixotic echoes of adaptive imitation between these two literary works offer a mirror of textual composition, they also reflect constitutive tensions in Sefarad concerning the tapestry of traumatic experiences reimagined and woven together across the novel.

RESUMEN Acreedora de importantes premios nacionales e internacionales, la obra de ficción de Paula Bombara (Bahía Blanca, 1972) gira en torno a episodios y situaciones de la vida cotidiana que invitan a reflexionar sobre distintas formas de la violencia, la memoria y la convivencia en las sociedades contemporáneas. Este trabajo propone una lectura contrastada de dos de sus obras recientes, Lo que guarda un caracol (2016) y Dos pequeñas gatas japonesas (2018). Destinadas respectivamente al público adolescente y a pequeños/as lectores/as ‘a partir de nueve años’, ambas narraciones tienen como protagonistas a personas con discapacidad: un joven aspirante a científico con un TEA (Trastorno del Espectro Autista) y un niño argentino descendiente de japoneses e irlandeses del que, solo hacia la mitad del relato, se revela que es ciego. Las acciones y particularidades de estos personajes entran en conflicto con las de otras voces que conforman la polifonía discursiva. Se examinarán algunos aspectos diegéticos, narrativos y poéticos de los relatos que confluyen en complejas definiciones identitarias que, más allá de los estereotipos (de nación, género, ‘normalidad’), se sitúan en el cruce de múltiples discursos culturales y proponen diversos modelos —más o menos excluyentes— de convivencia.

ABSTRACT Made in China, un récit où Toussaint joint ingénieusement la réalité à la fiction, tourne autour d’une souplesse tant passive qu’active: le narrateur, incarnant la figure de l’auteur, dit avoir pris l’habitude de se laisser porter par les événements, mais s’apprête aussi à accueillir le hasard et à ‘aimanter du vivant’. Notre analyse s’articule autour de l’énergie magnétique constitutive du processus d’aimantation et basée dans Made in China sur une narration non-linéaire. A la rupture de la linéarité du récit correspond la réunion des forces contraires qui génère un effet semblable à celui du champ magnétique. Nous soutenons que la suspension régulière du déroulement narratif prend appui sur l’acte de lire analysé par Michel de Certeau et s’établit sur des moments de silence propices à l’activité liseuse. Une polymorphie spatio-temporelle du réel se profile sous l’effet du champ magnétique et, étant donné la narration non-linéaire, offre aussi l’occasion de dialoguer avec la structure d’horizon empruntée à la phénoménologie husserlienne et réinterprétée par Merleau-Ponty. Un portrait de l’écrivain en rapport intime avec le monde en ressort et relie la ‘volonté consciente’ à la souplesse apparente.

ABSTRACT The article aims to analyse Appunti per un periplo dell’Africa (1954), a travel book written by Emilio Cecchi that narrates the writer’s impressions and experiences in some Portuguese African colonies. The text is influenced by fascist propaganda, linked to imperialism, and shows the tendency to present African populations as the object of colonization. We consider the various stereotypes and images that Cecchi uses in the representation of the colonized people of the Portuguese territories in Africa, in particular in discourses focused on race, women, dance and the colonial system. It turns out that Cecchi’s work is fully inserted into the ideological context of the early twentieth century, reaffirming a colonial discourse that supports the primacy of the civilized European over the primitive African and giving into the fascination for the exotic, typical of colonial literature.

ABSTRACT This essay aims to analyse the forms and mechanisms of leadership within the Italian and Spanish collectivities in Argentina between 1940 and 1960, studying in particular the action of two groups of political exiles: the Spanish Republicans, who arrived in the South American country mainly from 1939-1940; and the Italian fascists who arrived after 1946. First and foremost, the different political contexts at the time of arrival are compared (conservative governments vs. military government and then first government of Juan Domingo Perón). Secondly, the analysis focuses dynamically on two aspects: 1) the performance of both groups within the associations of the respective communities and the attempts to impose their own agenda within them; 2) the eventual political commitment within the receiving society. Finally, the factors that determined the greater or lesser success of each within and outside their communities of belonging are studied.