Paulo de Medeiros - Böcker

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, Guiné-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.

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, Guiné-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.

Essays on teaching a major Portuguese writerThe writings of Fernando Pessoa, one of Portugal's most renowned authors, stand alongside other significant works of modernist world literature and offer a view into the specific milieu of early-twentieth-century Lisbon. Writing under several identities known as heteronyms, Pessoa created works in many genres, including fragments that were assembled into his best-known text, The Book of Disquiet, only after his death.The essays in this volume explore questions raised by Pessoa about the nature of the self, the stability of the text, and the conflict between tradition and innovation. Part 1, "Materials," describes editions, translations, and other resources. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," address Pessoa's works and delve into the author's historical and cultural contexts, heteronyms and multiplicity, archives and editing processes, and connections with other authors and fields of study.

Essays on teaching a major Portuguese writerThe writings of Fernando Pessoa, one of Portugal's most renowned authors, stand alongside other significant works of modernist world literature and offer a view into the specific milieu of early-twentieth-century Lisbon. Writing under several identities known as heteronyms, Pessoa created works in many genres, including fragments that were assembled into his best-known text, The Book of Disquiet, only after his death.The essays in this volume explore questions raised by Pessoa about the nature of the self, the stability of the text, and the conflict between tradition and innovation. Part 1, "Materials," describes editions, translations, and other resources. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," address Pessoa's works and delve into the author's historical and cultural contexts, heteronyms and multiplicity, archives and editing processes, and connections with other authors and fields of study.

The filmography representing the ‘Portuguese Orient’ during the Estado Novo (1933–1974) is scarce and late, employing a simplified Luso- tropicalist rhetoric that repeatedly actualises the myth of a vast, long-lost, territory. This book examines the impact of cinematographic representations of the former Portuguese territories in the Orient on socio-cultural memories and narrative identities, through a critical exhumation of the archives and analysis of existing filmography. The analysis reveals that films of the ‘Portuguese Orient’ depict this imagined community with a certain degree of vagueness. This is largely a consequence of the prolonged disintegration of the metropolis’ relationship with this imagined community, a relationship that was mainly based on projections (about their alleged Portuguese identity) and ruins.

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.

Religious conflict has existed for as long as humanity has been capable of articulating the experience of faith. Belief in a higher power – whatever its nature – has tended to go hand in hand with the desire to force, or at least persuade, the rest of the world to agree with the believer. Portugal is a country shaped by successive waves of occupation over the centuries, and by the religious transformations these have entailed. Indigenous Lusitanians and Celtiberians withstood invasions by the Romans, Visigoths and North African Moors, as well as visitations by Jews, Phoenicians and others, but all were eventually killed, driven out or obliged to convert to Christianity. This book investigates texts dating from the eighteenth century to the present and set in periods ranging from the third century BC to the present day, in which the encounter between Paganism, Judaism and Islam, on the one hand, and what in due course became the dominant Christian status quo, on the other, illustrates the former’s resistance to absolute erasure. The study focuses in particular on women as the locus of dissent at the heart of national and sexual politics.

In the millennial transition the prefix ‘post’ had come to signify more and more not just the realisation of a ‘coming after’ but also of the impossibility of not seeing the present as still very much working through the wounds of the past. Yet with the appearance of pseudo-concepts such as ‘post-truth’ after an equally imaginary ‘death of History’, the logic of the ‘post’, itself always already under questioning, may appear to have outlived its usefulness. How to make sense of postcolonial theory in Europe in the present? One way might be to renew its significance as world conflicts have entered a new ‘post-imperial phase’ with the return of ideologies of empire in various parts of the world. The essays in this volume address those questions at both a conceptual, theoretical level, and through the analysis of specific case studies. In the Introduction Paulo de Medeiros and Sandra Ponzanesi review the main questions outlined above in relation to the current debates in the Humanities from their respective disciplinary perspectives. The volume is organised in four sections, each containing four chapters. Even though all the chapters present a reflection on Postcolonial Theory and Crisis, some focus more specifically on aspects of the crisis in a global perspective such as humanitarian crisis and the role of mediatization of conflicts, to issues related to human rights, refugees, migrancy, environmental crisis to questions of memory and postmemory as well as the critique of art and utopian thought.

The first volume of critical essays on the contemporary Portuguese novel in English, this book theorizes the concept of the ‘hypercontemporary’ as a way of reading the novel after its postmodern period.This inquiry into the notion of the hypercontemporary in its literary and cultural articulations analyzes a varied group of works representative of the most vibrant novels published in Portugal since 2000. The editors’ introductory chapter theorizes the concept of the hypercontemporary as one way of looking at the novel after its postmodern period – especially in its relation to questions of violence, memory and performativity.These essays show how the Portuguese novel has evolved in the past 25 years, and how, in their diversity, most of these novels exhibit several common traits, including new topics and writing strategies – sometimes developing further entropic lines characteristic of many Postmodern narratives – and themes of violence, rapid transformation, and the many threats to a contemporary world that seems mass-produced due to greater technological advances. Readings also discuss the use of innovative graphic forms available from current print technologies and global networks. The Hypercontemporary Novel in Portugal provides a necessary understanding of the current literary landscape of Portugal and, in the process, the aesthetics of hyperrealism or post-postmodernism.