Bio
Marisa Mourinha holds a BA in Philosophy from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon, having specialized in the fields of Aesthetics and Portuguese Philosophy. Later, she obtained a post-graduate degree in Comparative Literature in the same institute. In 2022, she finished her PhD in the Comparative Studies programme, specializing in Literary Translation, with a thesis on the translation of the Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes. She was a member of the Centre for Comparative Studies (from 2017), and is still a collaborator in their research project “Moving Bodies: Circulations, Narratives and Archives in Translation”. From December 2022, she a Post-doctoral researcher of the project “AfroLab–Building African Literatures. Institutions and consecrations inside and outside the Portuguese-language space 1960-2020”, with the Centro de Literaturas e Culturas Lusófonas e Europeias (CLEPUL). Her main areas of interest are translation studies, contemporary poetry and film studies
Rio de Janeiro, New York, Mindelo, Lourenço Marques. Transatlantic Crossings of Modernism Models Into the Portuguese-Language African Literature
While it is possible to consider Portuguese-speaking Africa as a unit in many aspects (there are political and institutional ties that help build that unity), there are many aspects in which the five countries that are part of this community (often referred to as PALOP, which stands for African Countries of Official Portuguese Language) have extremely different histories and characteristics. Geographically distant, and with distinctive orographic and demographic features, they have received the echoes of international modernist movements in several different ways and different paces. In this paper, we briefly show how international transits have been documented, linking the literatures of Cape Verde, Angola, or even Mozambique, to Brazilian models, and we then focus our attention on the less studied subject of the influence of Harlem Renaissance in Portuguese-language African literatures. The influence of Paris and French-speaking intellectuals in the Portuguese and Portuguese-language modernism is well know, as are its links with the English-language modernist long poetic sequence. But the role played by the poets of the Harlem Renaissance in Portuguese-language African literary production are less studied.This paper sketches out a panoramic view of the matter, before it focuses more specifically on the example of the Mozambican poet Rui Knopfli and Langston Hughes.