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Literary Connections between South Africa and the Lusophone World
connects literatures and cultures of South Africa and the
Portuguese-speaking nations of Africa and beyond, and is set within
literary and cultural studies. The chapters gathered in this volume
reinforce the critical and ongoing conversations in comparative and
world literature from perspectives of the South. It outlines some
possible theoretical and methodological starting points for a
comparative framework that targets, transnationally, literatures
from the South. This volume is an additional step to renew the
critical potentialities of comparative literary studies (Spivak
2009) as well as of humanistic criticism itself (Said 2004) as
South Africa and the Lusophone world (except its former colonizer,
Portugal) are outside the spatial and cultural dimension usually
defined as European and/or North American. In this sense and due to
the evident geographical and socio-historical links between these
regions, critical scholarship on their literary connections can
contribute to unprecedented perspectives of representational
practices within a broader contextual dimension, and in so doing,
provides the emergence of what Boaventura de Sousa Santos called
"epistemologies of the South" (Santos 2016), as it considers
cultural exchanges in the space of so-called "overlapping
territories" and "intertwined histories" (Said 1993).
Atlantis Otherwise expands the study of the African diaspora by
focusing on postcolonial literary expressions from Latin America
and Africa. The book studies the presence of classical references
in texts written by writers (black and non-black) who are committed
to the articulation of the fragmented history of the African
experience from the Middle Passage to the present outside of
Euro-centric views. Consequently, this book addresses the silencing
of the African Diaspora within the official discourses of Latin
America and Hispanic Africa, as well as the limitations that
linguistic and geographic boundaries have imposed upon scholarship.
The contributors address questions related to the categories of
race and cultural identity by analyzing a diverse body of
Afro-Latin American and Afro-Hispanic receptions of classical
literature and its imaginaries. Literary texts in Spanish and
Portuguese written in countries such as Brazil, Colombia, and
Equatorial Guinea provide the opportunity for a transnational and
trans-linguistic examination of the use of classical tropes and
themes in twentieth-century drama, fiction, folklore studies, and
narrative.
Since 2007, Afro-Puerto Rican women have been revising the
foundational myths of the island and the diaspora to create a new
vision of family as a national allegory that includes powerful
Black protagonists. Novelists Mayra Santos-Febres and Dahlma
Llanos-Figueroa tell the diaspora’s history, beginning with
trans-Atlantic slavery. Santos-Febres’s allegories use
sadomasochism and healing in the novels Fe en disfraz and La amante
de Gardel. Short story writers Arroyo Pizarro’s las Negras and
Yvonne Denis-Rosario’s Capá prieto chronicle the struggle to
create and preserve an empowering history of slavery and Black
people on the island and in the diaspora. Llanos-Figueroa’s
Daughters of the Stone envisages a sugar plantation in which
Afrodescendants are free and respected. They remake the ‘great
Puerto Rican family’ to give greater agency to Afro-Puerto Ricans
and include the diaspora in a ‘fractal family’. While
liberating, these novels also depict the traumas wrought by both
the maintenance and the dissolution of patriarchal,
heteronormative, colonial and racist structures.
The historical novels of Manuel Zapata Olivella and Ana Maria
Gonçalves map black journeys from Africa to the Americas in a way
that challenges the Black Atlantic paradigm that has become
synonymous with cosmopolitan African diaspora studies. Unlike Paul
Gilroy, who coined the term and based it on W.E.B. DuBois’s
double consciousness, Zapata, in Changó el gran putas (1983),
creates an empowering mythology that reframes black resistance in
Colombia, Haiti, Mexico, Brazil, and the United States. In Um
defeito de cor (2006), Gonçalves imagines the survival strategies
of a legendary woman said to be the mother of black abolitionist
poet Luís Gama and a conspirator in an African
Muslim– led revolt in Brazil’s “Black Rome.” These
novels show differing visions of revolution, black community,
femininity, sexuality, and captivity. They skillfully reveal how
events preceding the UNESCO Decade of Afro-Descent (2015–2024)
alter our understanding of Afro- Latin America as it gains
increased visibility. Published by Bucknell University
Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Unparalleled in its thoroughness, its accessibility, and its
relevance to all areas of Latin American studies, this volume is a
dictionary of 21,000 terms related to race, ethnicity, gender, and
sexuality used in the region over the past five centuries. It
includes the languages of Spanish, Portuguese, French, and their
Creoles, and encompasses an interdisciplinary range of sources that
highlight the intersectional nature of identity. The words and
phrases in this dictionary are accompanied by detailed English
definitions, literal translations, and notes on etymology and
usage, including the region and time period in which the terms have
occurred. Cross-references assist readers looking for synonyms,
antonyms, or alternate spellings. The volume contains equivalent
terms from the Francophone Indian Ocean islands, due to the history
of colonialism they share with the Antilles, as well as terms from
Africa that are connected to the Americas via the slave trade.
Terms and definitions are taken from humanities and social science
scholarship, literary works, personal interviews, colonial
documents, and internet discourse. The dictionary also features a
historical, cultural, and theoretical introduction, as well as an
extensive bibliography. Addressing the reality that categories for
identity are highly fluid, contentious, and contextually bound,
Dictionary of Latin American Identities is a helpful guide to such
nuances and complexities for researchers who are not fluent in the
languages of a given country or area. It will serve as an
invaluable reference for understanding and correctly using the
myriad words that describe and classify identities in Latin
America.
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