Transnational Portuguese Studies

Transnational Portuguese Studies offers a radical rethinking of the role played by the concepts of ‘nationhood’ and ‘the nation’ in the epistemologies that underpin Portuguese Studies as an academic discipline. Portuguese Studies offers a particularly rich and enlightening challenge to methodological nationalism in Modern Languages, not least because the teaching of Portuguese has always extended beyond the study of the single western European country from which the language takes its name. However, this has rarely been analysed with explicit, or critical, reference to the ‘transnational turn’ in Arts and Humanities. This volume of essays from leading scholars in Portugal, Brazil, the USA and the UK, explores how the histories, cultures and ideas constituted in and through Portuguese language resist borders and produce encounters, from the manoeuvres of 15th century ‘globalization’ and cartography to present-day mega events such as the Rio Olympics. The result is a timely counter-narrative to the workings of linguistic and cultural nationalism, demonstrating how texts, paintings and photobooks, musical forms, political ideas, cinematic representations, gender identities, digital communications and lexical forms, may travel, translate and embody transcultural contact in ways which only become readable through the optics of transnationalism.
Contributors: Ana Margarida Dias Martins, Anna M. Klobucka, Christopher Larkosh, Claire Williams, Cláudia Pazos Alonso, Edward King, Ellen W. Sapega, Fernando Arenas, Hilary Owen, José Lingna Nafafé, Kimberly DaCosta Holton, Maria Luísa Coelho, Paulo de Medeiros, Sara Ramos Pinto, Sheila Moura Hue, Simon Park, Susana Afonso, Tatiana Heise, Toby Green, Tori Holmes, Vivien Kogut Lessa de Sá and Zoltán Biedermann.

“This is easily the most complete collection produced to date to broach the issue of transnationalism in Lusophone culture and history and it will be an essential purchase for libraries where Portuguese is taught.”
Stephanie Dennison, University of Leeds

“Hilary Owen and Claire Williams’ volume is a superb contribution to the field of Portuguese Studies (a problematic signifier, as the editors point out in the introduction) at a time when the sometimes contentious intersections between the transnational and the global have caught the attention of scholars, students, and the reading public.”
Peggy Sharpe, Florida State University

Hilary Owen is a Professor Emerita in Portuguese and Luso-African Studies at the University of Manchester and a Research Fellow in the Sub-Faculty of Portuguese Studies at the University of Oxford. Claire Williams is an Associate Professor of Brazilian Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Peter’s College.