The American Portuguese Studies Association proposes a non-guaranteed session on migrant and diasporic voices in Luso-Afro-Brazilian literature, language, and culture. The session will consider how experiences of migration and diaspora affect familial bonds and foster alternative forms of kinship. The panelists will approach this topic by examining the linguistic landscapes of Japanese Brazilians, the experiences of a Nigerian migrant in São Paulo in a recent Brazilian film, the connections between Cabo Verde and peripheral Lisbon neighborhoods captured by a Portuguese filmmaker, and the literary and artistic expressions of kinship and diaspora that connect Portugal and Angola. These papers trace different groups and generations of migration. The migratory flows of Japanese to Brazil began in the early 1900s and have resulted in São Paulo having the largest population of Japanese descent outside of Japan. Over a century later, São Paulo continues to welcome migrants from other parts of Brazil and from abroad, especially African nations. This South-South migration is by choice, which contrasts it with the forced migration of enslaved Africans to the Americas in earlier centuries. Contemporary movements of Afro-diasporic peoples and cultures are marked by legacies of colonialism and enslavement, even if they do not directly address these events, as artists and writers examine when depicting the migratory, economic, and creative ties between Portugal and Lusophone Africa. By relating migration and diaspora to concepts of found families, this panel dialogues with the MLA’s presidential topic of “Family Resemblances.”

This session will allow scholars of Lusophone literature, language, and culture to approach migration and diaspora studies from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective. Migration and mobility studies have emerged as critical for scholars as they trace how connections between countries that speak Portuguese and new migratory flows inform literature and culture. Recent studies by Ignacio López-Calvo and Edward Mack have examined the literary and artistic expressions of Japanese migrants to Brazil and the Japanese Brazilian diaspora, whereas Waïl Hassan has examined the tertiary orientalism of Arab Brazilians. On the other side of the Atlantic, migration between Portugal and its former African colonies bears the legacies of empire, colonialism, and racial subjugation, as Daniel F. Silva examines in his scholarship. The edited volume by Cacildo Rêgo and Marcus Brasileiro focuses on how Lusophone migration unfolds in film, while the volume edited by Silva with Anna Tybinko and Lamonte Aidoo approaches race and mobility in the Luso-Hispanic world from a more capacious comparative perspective. The panelists in this session dialogue with this existing scholarship as they focus on linguistic change among Japanese Brazilians, the filmic representations of Nigerian and Cabo Verdean migrants in Brazil and Portugal, and the materiality of artistic connections between Portugal and Angola. The session will build on earlier studies by foregrounding how literature and the arts capture shifting views of race, nation, and language within migrant and diasporic communities.

The session will consist of four presentations of 12 to 14-minutes each, allowing for at least fifteen minutes of unstructured discussion at the end of the session. The session presider will keep introductions short and carefully document the time to ensure this period of conversation. The presentations are organized geographically, beginning with Japanese migrations across the Pacific to Brazil. Miguel Román focuses on signage in São Paulo’s Liberdade neighborhood to analyze how language use has changed among Japanese Brazilians. The next panelist Lara Bourdin will remain centered on São Paulo but shifts her attention to the recent migratory flows from West Africa to Brazil through a reading of the 2020 film Cidade pássaro. Krista Brune continues this focus on film on the other side of the Atlantic by examining the links between Cabo Verde and peripheral Lisbon neighborhoods in Pedro Costa’s filmography. The final panelist, Sharon Lubkemann Allen, further studies the ties between Portugal and its former African colonies through a comparative analysis of the works of José Eduardo Agualusa, Mónica de Miranda, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, and Délio Jassé. These panelists include scholars from the United States, Canada, and Portugal at diverse ranks with graduate students, a mid-career professor, and a senior scholar. Their disciplinary backgrounds include sociolinguistics, comparative literature, and cultural studies. These approaches to thinking about migration and diaspora as expressed in Portuguese underscore the growth of these field and gesture to its possible limitations. Together, these presenters will consider how migrant and diaspora voices in Luso-Afro-Brazilian literature, linguistics, and culture challenge narrow understandings of nation and family and, in the process, create alternative families.