Irene Maria F. Blayer Boeken

This collection of essays provides both critical and interdisciplinary means for thinking across diasporic travels within the Portuguese experience and its intersection with other peoples and cultures. The chapters are organized into four sections and offer rich, diverse, and insightful studies that provide a conceptualization of the Portuguese diaspora with special attention to the importance of cross-cultural interferences and influences. Within this framework, and from a variety of perspectives, some of the chapters depict identity-formation paths among Portuguese Jews and Luso-Indians in Australia, as well as the historical, cultural, and literary interplay among Portuguese and other diasporas in Goa, the West Indies, and Brazil. Other chapters analyze Portuguese-American literature and poetry, whereby the intersection of memory, dual identity, and place are meticulously explored. The last section of the book addresses Portuguese writers and poets who lived through (in)voluntary exile or were dislocated to Europe and Asia, and how their diasporic conditions interface with their textualized narratives. Place and memory as means of reconstructing a fragmented existence, in the writings of exiled writers, are also explored. The volume closes with a chapter on Portuguese illegal migration to France. The studies herein open new lines of inquiry into diaspora studies.

This book presents a selection of fourteen provocative and unique essays bringing together the views of exciting new scholarship on narratives and cultural identity in Latin America. In so doing, it balances theory, methodology, and description. The offerings in this volume deliver a clarion mix of original voices and cutting-edge approaches to the exploration of the topics, which reflect diverse perspectives on Latin American culture and literature. The contributions feature analyses of Latin American oral tradition, cultural identity, memory construction, storytelling, literary truth-claims, myth, autobiography, cultural policy and history, folk art and cinema.

This interdisciplinary collection of sixteen readings from the International Conference on Storytelling (1999), serves as a bridge between the academic and the non-academic world by incorporating essays from scholars as well as storytellers. Topics covered include education, ethnolinguistics, First Nations studies, folklore, linguistics, literature, psychology, and sociology.