Ana Luísa Amaral

Ana Paula Ferreira

Marinela Freitas

This volume maps the reception of New Portuguese Letters in Portugal and abroad, with a mainly feminist approach. The ban on the book, deemed scandalous, and trial of the authors found instant international support abroad. An invaluable contribution to the history of women, the book is still relevant today for its insights on equality and freedom.

International Reception

New Portuguese Letters to the World

contos de mulheres dos anos 40

A urgência de contar

This book represents the first attempt to query the contribution of women as cultural agents to the colonization, the anti-colonial opposition and the decolonization of territories ruled by Portugal in the African continent between the turn of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first. In contrast to the longstanding scholarship on the subject as regards other European empires, the entanglement of gender and colonialism has been ignored in the Portuguese case. Hence, this book takes a long view, surveying mostly little known historical and literary records that evince how "women" and "colonialism" were discursively constructed at particular points in time in view of a colonialist project that became the reason for being of the fascist authoritarian regime (1933-1974). A cultural studies approach of radical contextualization informs each of the five main chapters, in which documents from a range of disciplines are brought to bear on the main problematic of the female-authored works in focus. The latter are all written in the metropole as a place of colonial return and critical reflection. Beyond recuperating women's voices, this book suggests a story of Portuguese colonialism in the African continent that is anything but Lusotropicalist.

Ana Paula Ferreira

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