Spanish and Portuguese

The imagined presence of physical books and the process of their creation is a constant in Borges’s writings. Notions such as invented bibliographical citations and the labyrinthine conception of an all-encompassing library have
caused his work to be described as a prime example of metafiction. This article proposes a new theoretical lens with which to read these types of fictions that takes into consideration how Borges understands the book as a physical object and what this means for his own writings.

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La presencia imaginada de libros y su proceso de creación es algo común y corriente en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges. La inclusión de ideas tales como citas bibliográficas inventadas y una biblioteca universal y laberíntica resultan en la descripción de su escritura como un ejemplo supremo de metaficción. Este artículo propone una nueva perspectiva teórica para leer sus ficciones que toma en cuenta la manera en que Borges entiende el libro como un objeto físico.

La colección Breviarios es una de las más notables y exitosas del Fondo de Cultura Económica. Transformó completamente la industria editorial latinoamericana debido a la calidad física e intelectual de cada tomo presentado a sus lectores. Para entender mejor el impacto y las raíces estético-educativas de la colección en sí, examinaré una serie de sus precursores globales. En particular, analizaré varias colecciones mundiales de la primera mitad del siglo XX, desde las de Albatross y Penguin Books hasta las de Emecé Editores, por su formato y contenido. Además, compararé y contrastaré las estrategias editoriales y artísticas de esos precursores, para subrayar el carácter novedoso de los Breviarios.

The following study sets out to examine the Voice Onset Time (VOT) production of Spanish voiceless stops /p t k/ by speakers whose L1 is Ukrainian or English. VOT is defined as an interval between the stop burst and the onset of a vocal fold vibration and is used to establish a contrast between voiced and voiceless segments, as well as simple unaspirated voiceless stops and aspirated stops. VOT is known to differ significantly between languages as has been shown by Lisker & Abramson (1964). In languages like Ukrainian and Spanish, the voiceless stops /p t k/ are produced with a short lag VOT of less than 30 ms long. In other languages, such as English, these segments are realized with a long lag of more than 30 ms (Nagy & Kochetov, 2011). While numerous studies have been done on the comparison of English and Spanish VOT measurements and their transfer from one language to another (González-Bueno, 1997a; Díaz-Campos and Lazar, 2003; Knightly et_al, 2003; Díaz-Campos, 2006; Llama, Car...

Neste artigo examina-se em pormenor a re-apropria0o metaforica do
ritual antropofdgico na produgao poetica e ensaistica de Oswald de Andrade.
Para Oswald, e nesta re-significagao que reside a possibilidade de seformar
uma cultura nacional autentica. Este projecto de renovagao confronta-se,
porem, com uma contradigao fundamental, a qualse tornou no alvo predilecto
da maioria das criticas ao movimento. Isto e, a emancipafSo tanto cultural
como politica que propoe a antropofagia mantem-se, em larga medida,
definida por modelos culturais e epistemologicos europeus. Apesar desta
putativa "dependencia" intelectual, pretende-se contudo aqui que o
movimento prefigura, por assim dizer, alguns dosprocedimentos teoricos mais
paradigmdticos da teoria poscolonial, a saber, a chamada inversao de margem
e centro e a repudiagao da exclusao da figura do "indigena" ou "primitivo" do
discurso politico efilosofico do Iluminismo como ponto de partida para uma
reconsideragao global do pensamento iluminista. Conclui-se, assim, que so
neste sentido restricto e que sepode afirmar que a antropofagia "anticipa" o
posmodernismo.

This study interrogates a series of utopian projections that have informed Portuguese and Luso-African letters and culture since the Renaissance. Concentrating on the three crucial historical moments – Portugal’s tenuous hegemony in the Asian seas in the sixteenth century, the collapse of its colonial empire in the mid-1970s, and the post-independence period of re-evaluating nationalisms in Africa – the study examines the familiar “long narrative” which casts the Portuguese Discoveries as an inaugural and enabling event in Europe’s conquest of the world. In the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts, a sense of belatedness and danger in the face of a vast commercial network which preceded by several centuries Portugal’s arrival in Asia undercuts this account. The narratives about Portugal’s colonial wars in Africa negate the Salazarist project to restore the mythologized age of discoveries and seek simultaneously to converge with anti-colonial guerrilla movements. The work of António Lobo Antunes eschews this trend, insisting instead upon the incommensurability between the liberation struggles and Portugal’s April Revolution. Concomitantly, recent Lusophone African literature pictures the struggle of liberation as a cancellation of historicity, and underscores the “differend” between official constructions of nationhood and the future imagined from below.

Reviews

“This boldly designed and splendidly executed inquiry into discourses of colonial and postcolonial experience in the Portuguese-speaking world merits a readership as wide and varied as is the scope of its author’s interests and expertise. Dr. Madureira moves with ease and elegance over the vast territory of Portuguese, Brazilian and Lusophone-African literatures, historiography and criticism from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first ... This is comparative literature at its best – and one can only hope that readers from outside the usual-suspects circle of academics specializing in Luso-Afro-Brazilian studies will recognize it as well.” – Professor Anna Klobucka, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

“Madureira’s Imaginary Geographies manages, in all its referential complexity, and against all odds, to interweave a series of diverse theoretical perspectives from a number of cultural traditions to make a critical rethinking of an interconnected world in continual, ongoing semantic transition possible—especially given that this world, whether in Portuguese or any number of other languages, continues both “narratives of discovery and empire” and, just as importantly, narratives of resistance and alternative cultural agency.” – Prof. Christopher Larkosh, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for Ellipsis: Journal of the American Portuguese Studies Association

This paper provides a close reading of a crónica by Mia Couto which describes the toppling of a statue of an official hero of Portugal's nineteenth-century colonization of Mozambique on the eve of the country's transition from colony to nation. One of the central aims of my analysis is to foreground the moments in Couto's text that trouble the offi cially sanctioned fi gurations of nationhood and national identity. Such moments point to an experience and understanding of postcoloniality which implicitly question recent assertions concerning the different character and mode of postcoloniality necessarily brought about by an essentially different or subaltern Portuguese colonial enterprise in Lusophone countries.

Resumo A partir da análise demorada duma crónica de Mia Couto que relata o derrube, na véspera da independência de Moçambique, da estátua de Mouzinho de Albuquerque, um dos heróis da colonização portuguesa oitocentista, derrube este que se afigura como simbólico da transição política em curso, o presente artigo propõe uma leitura dos momentos de ruptura e ambivalência afl orados nesse texto com respeito à formação duma identidade e projecto nacionalistas putativamente homogéneos. Tal leitura permite-nos simultaneamente esboçar uma defi nição da pós-colonialidade moçambicana que coloca implicitamente em questão as hipóteses avançadas em anos recentes de que a diferença do colonialismo português se reper-cute necessariamente na diferença do pós-colonialismo lusófono.

... Thus, before this crossroads, Europe or the Atlantic, I pronounce myself for the Atlantic, as the only condition which will allow Portugal to regain its individuality, its specificity, its medieval and Renaissance genuineness.... I propose the creation of an authentic Luso-Brazilian

In this article, I propose that, in the face of the Manifesto antropófago's inchoate endeavor to supersede a dominant narrative about the irresistible rise of modern rationality, the critic can either accept the terms of this attempted repudiation or reposition it within the very epistemological framework which that text seeks to displace. In accordance with this latter epistemic model, antropofagia cannot but appear contradictory. Yet the passages that seem paradoxical and nonsensical appear so only because their essential meaning cannot be fully grasped from this frame of reference. It is therefore the epistemological framework which informs our " re-readings " of the Manifesto—rather than a failure or banality intrinsic to the text—that produces what he or she may come to define as nonsense and paradox.

This essay opens with an examination of Portuguese novels
about the colonial wars which seek to expose the referential emptiness
of the Salazarist imperial mystique, and present its "civilizing mission" as
an example of the very un-Historicity which Hegel notoriously ascribes
to Africa. Such texts arguably employ "postcolonial" strategies of reading
empire. It is precisely this gesture that Lobo Antunes refuses to perform.
His fiction suggests that to try to link the protagonist's colonial story with
Angola's narrative of resistance would only confirm his complicity with the
colonial project. By the same token, the April Revolution appears bereft
of historical meaning, reduced to one in an infinite chain of exchangeable
signifiers mobilized to name a desire for totality that cannot but fall short
of its object. In Antunes's fiction, Portugal's quest for universality seems
as illusory as the estadonovista yearning for the resurgence of an etiolated
imperial glory.