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A unique collection of Afro-Brazilian literature from both rising and well-known authors.

Besides Africa, Brazil is the largest Afro-descendant country, however, literature produced by Black Brazilians is predominantly unknown in Brazil and abroad. Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction emerges from a collaborative translation project, bringing Afro-Brazilian literature to a global audience demanding Afro-diasporic literature, as well as decolonial practices and content. This unique bilingual compilation of twenty-one short stories includes both established and emerging Afro-Brazilian voices, fostering cross-cultural understanding and affirming the legitimacy of Black Portuguese, pretoguês, as a literary language. The editors each provide introductions that contextualize the works, while also engaging in theoretical debates, shedding light on the role of literary translation in language teaching and the impact of the Literary Festival of the Peripheries in forming a new generation of Black Brazilian writers.

How did nineteenth-century Latin American novelists respond to moments when history itself seemed to come undone? Rather than treating dystopia as a futuristic genre, Palti traces its emergence from concrete political crises in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, as writers confronted national defeat, dictatorship, and revolutionary uncertainty. Reading Mexican fiction written after the U.S. occupation; Argentine texts produced under Juan Manuel de Rosas, including works by Esteban Echeverría, Domingo F. Sarmiento, and José Mármol; and Brazilian novels from the transition from Empire to Republic, with particular attention to Machado de Assis, the book shows how narrative form begins to falter. Plots stall, identities fragment, and stories resist closure. These breakdowns constitute early dystopian modes—atopia-atropia, heterotopia, and transtopia—through which literature registers the collapse of historical intelligibility. By locating dystopia in narrative form rather than theme, Palti offers a rich new account of literature under political catastrophe.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Winner of the Brazilian Studies Association’s Roberto Reis Book Award for First Monograph • Honorable Mention for the Latin American Studies Association’s Antonio Candido Book Award • Shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Book Award 

Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America investigates how fictional works have become sites for the production of knowledge, imagination, and intervention in Latin American environments. It investigates the dynamic relationship between fictional images and real places, as the lasting representations of forests, rural areas, and deserts in novels clash with collective perceptions of changes like deforestation and urbanization.

From the backlands of Brazil to a developing Rio de Janeiro, and from the rainforests of Venezuela and Peru to the Mexican countryside, rapid deforestation took place in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. How do fictional works and other cultural objects dramatize, resist, and intervene in these ecological transformations? Through analyses of work by João Guimarães Rosa, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Clarice Lispector, and Mario Vargas Llosa, Victoria Saramago shows how novels have inspired conservationist initiatives and offered counterpoints to developmentalist policies, and how environmental concerns have informed the agendas of novelists as essayists, politicians, and public intellectuals. This book seeks to understand the role of literary representation, or mimesis, in shaping, sustaining, and negotiating environmental imaginaries during the deep, ongoing transformations that have taken place from the 1950s to the present.

Forges a new understanding of how these two Lusophone nations are connected

The closely entwined histories of Portugal and Brazil remain key references for understanding developments—past and present—in either country. Accordingly, Fernando Arenas considers Portugal and Brazil in relation to one another in this exploration of changing definitions of nationhood, subjectivity, and utopias in both cultures. Examining the two nations’s shared language and histories as well as their cultural, social, and political points of divergence, Arenas pursues these definitive changes through the realms of literature, intellectual thought, popular culture, and political discourse.

Both Brazil and Portugal are subject to the economic, political, and cultural forces of postmodern globalization. Arenas analyzes responses to these trends in contemporary writers including José Saramago, Caio Fernando Abreu, Maria Isabel Barreno, Vergílio Ferreira, Clarice Lispector, and Maria Gabriela Llansol. Ultimately, Utopias of Otherness shows how these writers have redefined the concept of nationhood, not only through their investment in utopian or emancipatory causes such as Marxist revolution, women’s liberation, or sexual revolution, but also by shifting their attention to alternative modes of conceiving the ethical and political realms.