American Studies Over_Seas I: Narrating Multiple America(s) is a contribution to the ongoing debate in the field of American Studies in its most recent turn—Transnational American Studies—a paradigm shift in the discipline which runs counter to a consensus version of U.S. history and culture. The essays highlight the dissenting narratives in the study of "America" as a mindscape, multivocal and varied in its discourses of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and nationality. They also evidence the interrelation of the United States with Europe and examine how society, history, literature, and art intersect, providing alternative ways to comprehend the current geopolitical and cultural mindset on both sides of the Atlantic. These are interdisciplinary and diverse texts, authored by both senior leading scholars and promising younger researchers. The volume will benefit students and scholars of international American Studies, interdisciplinary and multicultural studies in history, sociology, modern languages literatures and cultures, cultural studies, comparative literatures, identity and ethnic studies, among others. It will also be of interest to researchers of American studies, transatlantic and transoceanic studies, diasporas and related fields of history, literature, art, and politics, as well as to the general reader with a background in the social sciences and the humanities.

(Multi)Vocal Exchanges Across the Ocean is the second volume of the project American Studies Over_Seas, an edited collection of texts honoring two pioneering Portuguese scholars in American literature and culture. Devoted to relations between Portugal and the United States, it includes essays by leading scholars whose research illuminates the multifarious ways in which history, sociology and literature intersect. A special feature of this collection is the inclusion of creative writing pieces that provide an imaginative intellectual backdrop to the transnational turn in American Studies. The literary contributions focus on diasporic experiences, dramatizing issues of ethnicity, identity, and interculturality. The essays of a more personal nature highlight the career of the two honorees, discuss protocols involving academic exchanges, and showcase dialogues between Europe and America over the past 30 years. Of benefit to the academic and the interested reader, this volume enriches the metaphor of the Atlantic Ocean as a space not only of struggle but also of ongoing conversation.

This collection of essays provides both critical and interdisciplinary means for thinking across diasporic travels within the Portuguese experience and its intersection with other peoples and cultures. The chapters are organized into four sections and offer rich, diverse, and insightful studies that provide a conceptualization of the Portuguese diaspora with special attention to the importance of cross-cultural interferences and influences. Within this framework, and from a variety of perspectives, some of the chapters depict identity-formation paths among Portuguese Jews and Luso-Indians in Australia, as well as the historical, cultural, and literary interplay among Portuguese and other diasporas in Goa, the West Indies, and Brazil. Other chapters analyze Portuguese-American literature and poetry, whereby the intersection of memory, dual identity, and place are meticulously explored. The last section of the book addresses Portuguese writers and poets who lived through (in)voluntary exile or were dislocated to Europe and Asia, and how their diasporic conditions interface with their textualized narratives. Place and memory as means of reconstructing a fragmented existence, in the writings of exiled writers, are also explored. The volume closes with a chapter on Portuguese illegal migration to France. The studies herein open new lines of inquiry into diaspora studies.

Narrating the Portuguese Diaspora presents a variety of perspectives on the Portuguese diaspora, from literature to identity discourse to biography and autobiography. The book is divided into three parts: reading literary identities within and without borders; constructing/constructed extra-literary identities at home and abroad; and literary ethnic voices from the North American diaspora and beyond. The 22 texts presented in this volume highlight the diasporic themes and backgrounds upon which the scope of the scholarly texts - as well as the personal contributions of short stories, poetry, interviews, and autobiographical memory - can be interwoven in a narrative identity construction.

Le present ouvrage est une etude comparative entre deux grandes figures de la litterature d'expression francaise: Franketienne, haitien de souche, et Tahar Ben Jelloun, d'origine marocaine. Ils jouissent d'une renommee internationale, fondee sur une oeuvre forte. Entendons: une oeuvre visionnaire, pertinente, qui s'inscrit dans la mimesis spatio-temporelle, le vecu humain, et qui fait aussi entendre un cri percant, un souffle envoutant, une musique originale. Elle croise, a bien des egards, celle de Rene Depestre, d'Abdelkebir Khatibi, de Yasmina Khadra, de Soljenitsyne et de Zola. Singuliere, elle est a la fois geographique et dramatique, avec le nomadisme des personnages, la mise en scene de l'espace, des atrocites et conflits actantiels. L'espace-fiction chez les deux poetes-romanciers s'ancre dans l'horreur, le chaos et la psychose, qui constituent des themes fondamentaux de leurs oeuvres. L'etude, qui offre une nouvelle approche theorique et une methode d'analyse efficiente, est presidee par la demarche anthropo-geographie semiologique, qui suggere une lecture ouverte, interdisciplinaire, favorisant une pluralite de sens de l'oeuvre de Franketienne et de Ben Jelloun. Elle permet ainsi d'apprehender leur discours fictionnel et poetique, plein de fievre et de colere, qui rend compte du monde claustral, sinistre, angoissant, et qui refuse que l'homme sombre dans la decheance morale, l'inhumanite. D'ou resulte une anthropologie poetico-geographique et philosophique.

Este libro explora la dinamica de los movimientos sociales garifunas y su migracion transnacional entre Honduras y la ciudad de Nueva York. Como pueblo afroindigena con comunidades en cinco estados-nacion, los garifunas son ejemplares de las formas complejas como las ideas de raza, etnia y nacion configuran condiciones de trabajo, identidades, formas de discriminacion, asi como formas de resistencia y movimientos economicos, politicos y sociales en el espacio transnacional. Basado en el trabajo de campo realizado en la decada de 1990, el libro muestra como el pueblo garifuna problematiza los modelos de inmigracion unilineal y asimilacionista, mediante la vinculacion de sus aldeas centroamericanas con ciudades globales como Nueva York a traves de la circulacion constante de bienes, miembros de la familia, dinero e ideas, lo que forma una comunidad en el espacio transnacional. Sin embargo, el libro tambien da a conocer que las comunidades transnacionales garifunas enfrentan muchos desafios para su supervivencia bajo los modelos de desarrollo neoliberal en Honduras que amenazan sus tierras, supervivencia economica y derechos politicos; la division racial de trabajo en los Estados Unidos, la cual los margina como pobres, inmigrantes, afrolatinos; y el racismo que experimentan como sujetos indigenas, negros y latinos a lo ancho y largo de su diaspora. El libro es una fuente excelente de investigacion para toda persona interesada en el pueblo garifuna, los afro-latinos, la raza y racismo en Centroamerica, los movimientos sociales etnicos en contra del nacionalismo mestizo y de los modelos de desarrollo neoliberal, la migracion transnacional, los latinos en la ciudad de Nueva York; y los efectos de los cambios en la politica de inmigracion de los Estados Unidos sobre los pueblos de America Central en el siglo XX. El libro expone la situacion de los garifunas en Honduras en la decada de 1990, antes de la crisis de la violencia y la migracion masiva que empezaron a experimentar en el siglo XXI.