The representation of the death of Angola’s first president in Portuguese newspapers can help understanding the character of the angolan poet, as well as providing elements to understand Portugal at that time and its relation with Angola.

Neste artigo analiso a correspondência ainda inédita entre o intelectual angolano Mário Pinto de Andrade e o escritor Fernando Monteiro de Castro Soromenho. Através de trinta e nove cartas escritas no arco de dezasseis anos (1954-1970), reconstruo a colaboração entre os dois intelectuais numa série de projetos editoriais visados à divulgação da literatura e a cultura angolana projetos que, no contexto da luta de libertação, tinham uma incontestável dimensão política. Ao mesmo tempo, considero as condições materiais em que Mário Pinto de Andrade e Castro Soromenho desenvolveram o seu trabalho e os compromissos que assumiram no âmbito da luta pela independência de Angola.

Este artigo analisou o reexame duma parte da história de luta e guerra civil angolana no romance Estação das Chuvas, de José Eduardo Agualusa. Partiu-se da hipótese de que a obra foi feita com o intuito de recontar os eventos relacionados, citando momentos históricos, dando-lhes nova roupagem. Os resultados apontam que o romance reexamina a história do país, deflagrando que o propósito que levou os três grandes movimentos independendistas (MPLA, UNITA e FNLA) a lutar não se deve a causas sociais, conforme argumentado por eles, mas, sim, à fome pelo poder, resultando na guerra cilvil naquele país africano.

Se presentan consideraciones sobre el corpus Afuera crece un mundo de Fernández y Um defeito de cor de Gonçalves, desde la Literatura Comparada, los Estudios Culturales y Feministas. A partir de estas perspectivas y del abordaje de la esclavitud, un problema que sobrepasa el siglo XIX e influencia la producción de la Nueva Novela Histórica en la contemporaneidad, observamos las narrativas como agencias/resistencias que revelan y rompen la idea de nación construida tanto en el Brasil como en la Nueva Granada/Colombia. Así, estas trayectorias éticas, estéticas y políticas de las narrativas de los esclavizados, mapas a través de los océanos amefricanos, dibujan un gran rizoma que pasa de la historia traumática del Middle Passage a una Poética de la Transfiguración.

I investigate, in works by Djaimilia Almeida and Orlanda Amarílis, the story of characters who dreamed of being in Lisbon and being Portuguese: Cartola (Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso), Boa Morte (Maremoto) and the protagonist of “Desencanto” (Cais-do-Sodré te Salamansa). The works denounce the impossibility for these characters to access “portugalidade”, an imaginary that celebrates the national mythologies and that manifests itself even in urban space. The exclusion of the characters occurs precisely in the urban space, and is related to matters of race and gender. My analysis has a feminist and postcolonial approach, in dialogue with Mbembe (2016), hooks (2005), Pratt (1994) and Vergés (2021).

This article explores the articulations of Afropolitanism in contemporary Portuguese literature, by authors of African descent, in terms of identity, aesthetics, ethics and politics. In the famous essay that popularised the term ‘Afropolitan,’ Taiye Selasi places this new ‘African of the world’ on the move between Africa and invariably at least one G7 city (Selasi, “Bye-Bye Babar” [2005]). This article aims to bring the notion of Afropolitanism developed by Selasi and shortly afterwards further developed by Achille Mbembe to the context of the European semi-periphery and Afro-descendant literature in Portuguese (Mbembe, “Afropolitanism” [2007]). On the one hand, I will show how writers of African descent in contemporary Portugal (Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida and Kalaf Epalanga) have recently reclaimed forms of Afropolitan identity affirmatively from Lisbon, de-centring the trajectories celebrated by Selasi and, consequently, bringing new geographies to African cosmopolitanism. On the other hand, I will argue that the Afropolitanism articulated by this group of writers, reformulated and situated in the post-colonial Lusophone context, has also responded to some of the criticisms levelled at the very notion of Afropolitan identity proposed by Selasi, making a relevant contribution to the contemporary debate on the ethical, aesthetic, and political dimensions of Afropolitanism.

This article discusses the literary narrative of the Guinean national conflict as a mechanism for strengthening a literature of memory with traces of resistance and analyzes how this narrative develops in the chant-poem No fundo do canto (2007), by Guinean Odete Semedo, shaped by the civil war in Guinea-Bissau. Semedo's poem provides fundamental elements to understand the process of engendering literature that, by concatenating history and fiction, is materialized to strengthen national resistance. The historical conflicts in Guinea-Bissau described in literary terms are important to understand the dynamics of the production of literature that opens the way for a discussion about memory, tradition, culture, national identity and resistance. It is, therefore, a matter of remembering and not allowing the fears of the past again haunt the Guinean nation.

In the context of European expansion during the 16th century, the evangelization of peoples labeled as pagans occupied a central role. The missionaries did not take long to realize that the evangelization of these populations could only advance if carried out in a negotiated manner. With this in mind, the missionaries, especially the Jesuits, devoted themselves to studying the languages and customs of the peoples they sought to evangelize. Using the example of the Jesuit experience in Japan, I will discuss the way the missionary reports about the "religion" of pagan populations, as the authors called it, propelled an unprecedented intellectual curiosity in Europe.

This work seeks to point to a reading that allows a dialogue with the aspects of South African society present in the work Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life of John Maxwell Coetzee. From the way the events were organized and exposed in the narrative, we emphasize the construction of memory as a base element of this writing, and we propose to analyze some spare points from the threads that tie up the past events. Gender and race were two highlighted markers for the search for understanding the world look that a character has to build his own world, in part coinciding with the author’s life. This exercise guides us on sociocultural paths found in times lived, remembered, and recorded.