Archives
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Angola - collection, memory, and literature
Vol. 26 No. 2 (2025)The sources of information in literature constitute significant references about what is registered in the form of a paper book or in the virtual world, making it possible to historicize, understand or even reinvent the literary object from them.
By contemplating a wide range of disciplines, which range from Genetic Criticism to Literary History, work with documentation in the literary field opens up numerous paths/disciplines that range from Genetic Criticism insofar as it allows the elaboration of a reading of the work not the based on the published product - the publication of the book -, but also on the writing processes, with their drafts and versions, favoring the subversion of notions such as progress, originality, or even the revision of biographies. Likewise, the study of literary collections and correspondence between authors and/or critics allows for the tracing of sociability networks in the literary field, as well as the paths of processes of creation and autobiographical expression.
A look at the area of African Literature, especially in Angolan literature, reveals that, despite these multiple paths of work, research based on primary sources has been scarce, certainly because there are few documents available to researchers, whether in because of historical adversities, or because the documents are in private hands. Making room for works that have managed to break through this limitation is the meaning of the dossier “Angola: collection, memory and literature”. -
Afro-descendant Literatures in Brazil and Portugal
Vol. 26 No. 1 (2025)In recent years, we have observed with optimism a significant growth in the presence of black authors in the Brazilian publishing market, which, however, does not erase the ethnic-racial impasses in a society marked by its structural racism. In Portugal, on the other hand, we follow the growing tensions over Afro-descendant authorship as a result of the struggle for the visibility of this segment that awakens historical specters that still torment us and that condition the reception of certain texts. As Miguel Vale de Almeida (2022) rightly points out in relation to his country but which, to a large extent, also applies to Brazil, “Portuguese democracy did not know how to decolonize (itself). A demonstration of this failure is the disturbing continuity of the hegemony of the Lusotropicalist narrative. This narrative, widely disseminated in common sense, supports processes of denial of structural and institutional racism.”
History thus emerges, in these two contexts, as a fundamental element for understanding the black and Afro-descendant experience in all its extension since, when officially written as part of a selective ideological force field that belongs to the dominant classes, it is full of silences. In this dialectic movement between history and lived experience, art ascends as a privileged space of struggle and resistance and reveals itself not only in the sphere of ethics and politics, but also in that of aesthetics.
Delimiting the extent of this influence should be one of the first tasks of anyone dedicated to research in the field of Portuguese language literature. Correctly measuring the impact of socio-historical phenomena on the domain of literature is one of the most adequate and effective weapons to combat both the predominance of a sterile aesthetic agenda and to prevent literature from becoming a dehydrated field of social meaning.
In this way, the proposed interlocution between Literature and the fields of Human and Social Sciences, mainly the field of History, is configured and consolidated as an efficient structure for critical analysis and literary interpretation.
In this number 45 of the magazine Via Atlântica, we will welcome unpublished theoretical-critical articles that reflect on the production of black and/or Afro-descendant authorship in Portugal and Brazil that address associated themes, such as: literature and social life, literature and history, literature and social transformation, literature, and resistance in light of the characteristics of the Portuguese and Brazilian contexts.
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Women's Literature: Memories, Peripheries and Resistance in the Luso-Afro-Brazilian Space
Vol. 25 No. 2 (2025)The special dossier “Women’s Literature: Memories, Peripheries and Resistances in the Lush-Afro-Brazilian Space” is part of the research project Women’s Literature: Memories, Peripheries and Resistances in the Lush-Afro-Brazilian Atlantic, with the acronym WomenLit, approved for funding by the Foundation for Science and Technology, in Portugal, and which brought together a team of researchers affiliated with universities and scientific research centers in Portugal, Brazil, Angola, and Mozambique. While the professional affiliation of the organizers of the dossier reflects this breadth and geographical diversity, the articles included explore the writing of women from São Tomé and Príncipe, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, Brazil, and Portugal. The aim was to think about literature written by women in the Portuguese-Afro-Brazilian space, contributing to a discussion around the representations of memory and post-memory and the questions regarding the definition of literary canons and different literary strategies that resist the representation of hegemonic male subjectivities in narratives of collective memory.
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Gênero, sexualidades e novas subjetividades nas literaturas de língua portuguesa
Vol. 14 No. 2 (2013)
