The Iberian Studies Forum hosts Ricardo Vasconcelos, associate professor of Portuguese and Brazilian literature at San Diego State University, presenting “The Imaginary of Brazil for Fernando Pessoa and Other Portuguese Modernists.”

This presentation discusses the imaginary of Brazil and its representation in Portuguese modernist authorship, namely in Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s literary and nonliterary texts. Pessoa and other Portuguese modernists sometimes reference Brazil in the context of their avant-garde creations, as well as in other texts, providing us with insights into the authors’ colonial/postcolonial relationships with that nation as an icon. Moreover, such references allow us to frame the visceral and libidinal links between their writing and their own experience of carrying national/imperial identities at a time of decline of that same empire, and of emergence of a long-lasting semi-peripheral status. 

Contact Krista Brune (kbrune@psu.edu) for more information.