Lusophone Journal of Cultural and Communication Studies (NAUS)

Interview with António Cunha, dreamer, manager, and director of Rádio Nova da Língua Portuguesa

Vanessa Cavalcanti — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Editorial — Travessias para mundos possíveis: Estéticas da memória, utopias feridas e vozes de resistência

Vanessa Cavalcanti, Isabel Lousada, Luísa Paolinelli, Vanda de Sousa — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Direitos Humanos em Portugal. História e Utopia, de Susana Mourato Alves-Jesus (2023)

Pedro Caridade de Freitas — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Breve História de Portugal: A Era Contemporânea (1807–2020), de Raquel Varela e Roberto della Santa (2023)

José Franco — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0500

TWENTY ONE DAYS IN A BOAT, BY HUMBERTO PASSOS FREITAS (2021)

Pedro Panhoca da Silva, Camila Concato — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Autodefesa: uma filosofia da violência, de Elsa Dorlin (2020)

Solange Mayumi Lemos — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Questioning the universal museum — a decolonial exercise

Karina de França Silva Valle — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0500

This text aims to question spaces considered as cultural spaces, especially museums. We propose an inquiry into the way they are organized and intended to "store the treasures of humanity," while simultaneously normalizing the oppressions that these spaces propagate. We present the concept of the post-museum by Françoise Vergès (2023) and how it can contribute to historical reparations for racialized peoples.

Ceci n’est pas une théorie: Diderot, Magritte and Merleau-Ponty on the aesthetics of the invisible

Paulo Alexandre e Castro — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0500

This essay considers the possibility of an aesthetic theory of the invisible, based on three distinct authors with distinct approaches, namely Denis Diderot, René Magritte and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and through literature, painting, and phenomenology, respectively. We seek a broad dialogue between the authors whose common problem lies within the same order, that is, within what can be considered the truth of the sensible (visible or not) or its character of illusion, or in other words, how it is possible to obtain an aesthetic theory of the (in)visibility and of the world.

Saramago and the metamorphosis of Portugal’s project

Annabela Rita — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0500

This text will examine how Portugal's national project is transformed according to the route defined in the myth of Ourique. In his work Memorial do Convento (1982), José Saramago develops a reflection on Portuguese culture through mirror games between texts, imaginaries, symbols and eras that allow us to glimpse, through the aesthetic signs, the metamorphoses of a political project. Using contrapuntal, chiaroscuro and sfumato processes, Saramago memorially interweaves past and present, utopia and dystopia, diverse social spaces (court, clergy and people), reality and visionary thinking, reality and fiction, Romanticism and current affairs, life and death.

Magical realism, teleportation and decoloniality in Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison

Sueli Meira Liebig — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Magical Realism, the literary gender to which these novels belong, has been a genre that is traditionally seen as a Western endeavor, reinforcing colonial ideas since its appearance. Since this branch of Realism is commonly understood as subversive and decolonial (Bernardino-Costa & Grosfoguel, 2016; Frazier, 2018), I seek to explain through this comparative study, the relationship between this fictional genre and the feminist decolonial movements that existed in the manners of colonization of the United States. Both works act by means of the speculative trope of “teleportation” (Oxford,2020; Piberam,2021; Michaelis, 2024), common theme to Kindred and Beloved, as a method of subversion of the Western Cosmo view, by questioning the conjectures of History and Science (Agatti, 1977). The purpose of this article is to verify the role that teleportation excerpts play in each of the two novels, examining excerpts of time travel and other supernatural phenomena that result in decolonial criticism. I conclude that such magic phenomena, commonly found in the writings of Black women (Ahmad & Kaneez, 2017; Sousa & Dias, 2018), occur in these works as efficient tools that, in a subliminal way, enact to fight the colonial intersectionality and its ailment.

“Take everything from us, but leave us the music!”: The testimonial nature in the poetry of Noémia de Souza

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Noémia de Souza's poetry presents traits that reveal themselves as an instrument of denunciation of the system and the violence suffered by the African people. Most of his texts were written between 1948 and 1951, a period marked by blatant racism and his exile in Lisbon (1951). In this context, the author assumes a fundamental role for Mozambican Literature, not only as a black woman who occupies a space dominated by whites, but as a writer who speaks about exploitation, racism and brutality against her people and their culture. His writings are presented as a symbol of resistance and testimony against the current power and in favor of the black minority. Based on the writing of this poet, specifically the poem “Súplica” written around 1951, during the Portuguese fascist regime of António Salazar, we aim, a priori, to understand the context of the formation of Portuguese-language African Literatures, focusing on that of Mozambique , and subsequently, outline an analysis from the perspective of testimony theory, pointing to the aspects present in the poem that reveal how “historically silenced groups and ethnicities appear suffocated” (Pachêco de Souza, 2024, p. 20). For the construction we propose, regarding Portuguese language literature, we are based on Souza e Silva (1996); Meloni and Franco (2015); Fonseca and Moreira (2017); And regarding the Testimony Theory, we use Pachêco de Souza (2024); Salgueiro (2010) and Ferraz (2022).