PORT3920: Topics in Lusophone Cultures

The present course seeks to bring Portugal, Brazil ,and Portuguese-speaking Africa to bear on current, mostly Anglo-American understandings of empire, colonialism, cultural conflicts, mixings, and assimilation; diaspora, postcolonialism, and globalization. To that end, you will study a number of literary, visual, and musical texts from Portugal, Brazil, and Lusophone Africa featuring empire as fantasy to be fulfilled; violent reality to be denounced, exorcized and rejected, or further mythified; and/or ever returning phantoms unsettling the notion of independence and of the so called transnational turn of globalization. The course is divided into three segments within which readings and viewings will follow a chronological order. First you will learn about the Portuguese empire in India and its present-day remnants in Goa; you will then learn about Brazil's postcolonial development and how the former colony "writes back" to the former metropolis and decrees itself as "the country of the future," albeit not without the racist heritage of colonialism and the myth of racial democracy; finally, you will learn about decolonization, immigration, and the Africanness of postcolonial Portugal. The course is taught in Portuguese and you will use Portuguese in class and in all written assessments. The latter includes graded written assignments, a research project with class presentations, and may also include partial exams. Topics vary and are specified in the class schedule. prereq: [1101, 1102, 1103, 1104] or [3001, 3003] or equiv

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