Call for no. 37 - Other geographies, new pacts

Call for vol. 18, no. 37 - Submission deadline: 15/01/2026 a 15/05/2026
Publication: October 2026.

THEME – Other geographies, new pacts

Guest editors: Nazir Ahmed Can (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and Renata Flavia da Silva (Universidade Federal Fluminense)

Able to generate specific dynamics within poems and narratives, guiding the relationships between the represented subjects and offering clues about the impasses of historical time, space has always been one of the great protagonists of the literary adventure. The weight that has been attributed to it by theory in recent decades confirms this fact. Indeed, the “spatial turn”, initiated by Gaston Bachelard in the 1950s and revisited in the 1970s in the former Soviet Union by Youri Lotman and Mikhail Bakhtin, is the origin of a set of concepts and currents that give centrality to the notions of geography, place, landscape, territory, among others (Ziethen, 2013). The studies by Ida Alves (on Portuguese literature) and by Tania Macêdo, Rita Chaves and Laura Padilha (focused on African literatures in Portuguese), just to mention a few names that have mapped the main trends in different literary fields, demonstrate the impact of spatial coordinate on the literatures produced in PortugueseAt the same time, in recent decades, we have also observed a trend in Portuguese-language literatures: the inscription of other geographies. The representation of international spaces, on the one hand, or of national geographies overwritten by political powers, on the other, expands literary territoriality, the aesthetic code, and the ideological range of these contexts. Adopting 'space' in its broadest sense, but privileging foreign territories (and all those which, although national, acquire a similar condition), Revista Abril will gather articles that examine the significance and expressive potential of the new geographies inscribed in the literatures of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal and São Tomé and Príncipe.

ZIETHEN, Antje. “La littérature et l’espace”. Arborescences: révue d’études françaises, nº 3, 2013, p. 3-29.