Surveying Lusophone cultures: Luso-Brazilian women translators in the Circum-Atlantic world (CEEC Inst 2018 - PA)

This project examines the larger importance of a few Luso-Brazilian women to transnational Lusophone cultures and circuits of conviviality of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It reveals the pioneering role they played in either creating, disrupting, or understanding conflict and representations of difference and identity between Portugal and Brazil through the practice of translation and criticism. The research draws on overlooked and inaccessible materials, including alternative newspapers, marginalia, correspondence, and journals. These unofficial vehicles of intercultural dialogue functioned as incubators of other forms of conviviality by which new solidarities among women within the circum-Atlantic World came into being. These solidarities refashion the more official circuit of cultural exchange between Portugal and Brazil as they illuminate the ways conflict and identity brought an understructure of Luso-Brazilian culture into view. Ultimately, this project seeks to understand how the work by these women relate to issues of the global present, including conflictual categories of gender, difference, and interculturalism.