Call for No 38 - Displacement and Intercultural Memory: Dialogues and Tensions in Portuguese Literature and African Literatures in Portuguese Language

Call for vol. 18, no. 38 - Submission deadline: 01/06/2026 to 30/11/2026.
Publication: April 2027.

THEME – Displacement and Intercultural Memory: Dialogues and Tensions in Portuguese Literature and African Literatures in Portuguese Language

Guest Editors: Prof. Dr. Maged Talaat Mohamed Ahmed Elgebaly (Universidade de Assuã) and Prof. Dr. Júlio Cesar Machado de Paula (Universidade Federal Fluminense).

Despite its economic motivations and the violence that frequently accompanied it, Portuguese maritime expansion fostered – on a cultural level – many of the relationships that would later support what came to be known as globalization or mundialização (depending on the theoretical framework applied). The human flow that follows this process brought into contact the multiple, complex memories of cultural groups from Africa, Asia, and the Americas – in addition to Iberian groups, which were themselves heterogeneous by origin. In this context, history witnessed both the clash between distinct modes of memory (the written one versus the orality, for instance) and the rearticulation of cultures themselves through the shifting of memory traits from one group to another, resulting in what might be named "intercultural memories." As these intercultural memories generally arise from relationships defined by mechanisms of hegemony and subalternity, they constitute vital material for analyzing historical and social tensions linked to phenomena such as migration (emigration and/or immigration), exile and insílio (internal exile), the diasporic condition, translation (linguistic and/or cultural), and the rigidity or fluidity of borders, among others. Viewing literature as a privileged space for the construction and recording of intercultural memories, this dossier aims to gather articles and essays that discuss the configurations and reconfigurations of memory – particularly within contexts of displacement and contact between distinct groups – in Portuguese literature and African literatures in Portuguese language, as well as in the dialogues established between those literatures and the literatures from other geographies and languages.

Keywords: Intercultural memory. Displacement. Literary comparatism.