Offering a range of critical perspectives on a vibrant body of films, this collection of essays engages with questions specific to the various cinemas and films addressed while putting forward an argument for their inclusion in current debates on world cinema. The collection brings together 11 chapters by recognized scholars, who analyze a variety of films and videos from Angola, Cape Verde, Guine-Bissau, and Mozambique. It also includes an interview with Pedro Pimenta, one of the most distinguished African film festival organizers. Drawing on various theoretical perspectives, the volume strives to reverse the relative invisibility that has afflicted these cinemas, arguing that most, if not all, Lusophone films are transnational in all aspects of production, acting, and reception. The initial three chapters sketch broad, comparative overviews and suggest theoretical approaches, while the ensuing chapters focus on specific case studies and discuss a number of key issues such as the convergence of film with politics, the question of gender and violence, as well as the revisiting of the period immediately following independence. Attention is given to fiction, documentary films and recent, short, alternative video productions that are overlooked by more traditional channels. The book stresses the need to pay attention to the significance of African film, and Lusophone African film in particular, within the developing field of world cinema. Bringing together general overviews, historical considerations, detailed case studies, and focused theoretical reflections, this book is a significant volume for students and researchers in film studies, especially African, Lusophone cultural studies, and world cinema.

Ana Luisa Amaral is considered to be one of the foremost Portuguese poets of her day, and although her poetry has been translated into many other languages, this is the first major collection of her poems to be published in English. Born in Oporto in 1956, and, for many years, Professor of Anglo-American Literature at the University of Oporto, Ana Luisa Amaral published her first collection of poems, Minha Senhora de Que, in 1990, and has since published many more, along with plays, children's literature, a novel and translations from English. Her work has brought her many prizes both in Portugal and elsewhere. Her poems are resolutely female, but she casts her net very wide in terms of subject matter, from tender poems about her daughter to thoughts provoked by finding a crumb lodged in the pages of a second-hand book to musings about Galileo, the theory of relativity and the larger themes of loneliness, loss, and death. She is a writer immersed in her own culture, but steeped, too, in the poetry, for example, of Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare, and in the world of the Bible and the Greek myths. The result is a poetry that takes equal pleasure in the physical and metaphysical, playing with words and ideas, a poetry that is always refreshingly oblique, taking the reader down unexpected intellectual and linguistic paths. Her poetry invites readers to share her own wonder and perplexity at life's joys and griefs.

Ana Luisa Amaral is considered to be one of the foremost Portuguese poets of her day, and although her poetry has been translated into many other languages, this is the first major collection of her poems to be published in English. Born in Oporto in 1956, and, for many years, Professor of Anglo-American Literature at the University of Oporto, Ana Luisa Amaral published her first collection of poems, Minha Senhora de Que, in 1990, and has since published many more, along with plays, children's literature, a novel and translations from English. Her work has brought her many prizes both in Portugal and elsewhere. Her poems are resolutely female, but she casts her net very wide in terms of subject matter, from tender poems about her daughter to thoughts provoked by finding a crumb lodged in the pages of a second-hand book to musings about Galileo, the theory of relativity and the larger themes of loneliness, loss, and death. She is a writer immersed in her own culture, but steeped, too, in the poetry, for example, of Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare, and in the world of the Bible and the Greek myths. The result is a poetry that takes equal pleasure in the physical and metaphysical, playing with words and ideas, a poetry that is always refreshingly oblique, taking the reader down unexpected intellectual and linguistic paths. Her poetry invites readers to share her own wonder and perplexity at life's joys and griefs.

Paulo De Medeiros concentrates on some aspects of the Book of Disquiet, in the hope of contributing to what he see as the fundamental task of relating Fernando Pessoa to other modernist writers and addressing the theoretical questions Pessoa's texts raise in a comparative manner.

Fernando Pessoa wrote prolifically in many genres until his untimely death in 1935, and he has long been widely recognized as Portugal's most influential 20th century writer. The publication of the 'Book of Disquiet' in 1982, however, caused a seismic change in the appreciation of his work and its place in Modernism. In that great and vast collection of fragments, Pessoa firmly established his place among the canon of European modernists and radically questioned many of modernity's assumptions. Alain Badiou, for example, has argued that philosophers are not yet able to assimilate Pessoa's thinking. Paulo de Medeiros's study takes up that challenge, exploring the text's connections with photography, film, politics and textuality itself, and developing comparisons with D.H. Lawrence, Walter Benjamin, and Franz Kafka.