centro macau
Abelha da China is not colonialist press
In an interview with PONTO FINAL, Cátia Miriam Costa, researcher at the Center for Studies at ISCTE and author of the essay A Abelha da China: a Macanese appropriation of political discourse, which is integrated in the book A Abelha da China nos 200: Casos, Characters and Confrontations in the Liberal Experience of Macau, explains that the publication of the periodical Abelha da China was “an important step in the democratization of access to the colonial administration”.
In this interview, the researcher elaborates on the historical context of the foundation of the newspaper Abelha da China, its impact on the metamorphosis of the media and political landscape in Macao society and on the role of the Portuguese-language periodical press in Macau today.
Asian Writing in Portuguese: proposal for a special issue of Romance Studies (Taylor & Francis)
Duarte Drumond Braga, Center for Comparative Studies, CEComp, University of Lisbon
Paul Melo e Castro, University of Glasgow
The issue of Asian Writing in Portuguese has not yet been raised because Lusophone studies are rooted in a nationalist view of the Portuguese language map consisting solely of 8 nations, which makes the possibility of “Asian literatures in Portuguese” an entirely contrasting possibility. As a matter of fact, Asia as a space that has also written in Portuguese is something quite new as a scholarly field. African literatures in Portuguese are well known, they correspond to new nations, and their corpus is identified, which is not the case in Asia.
The 3 Portuguese Asian colonies that survived until very recently (Goa in 1961, Timor in 1975 and Macao in 1999) do not correspond (except East-Timor) to national models, and their intellectual life in Portuguese only recently started drawing more scholarly attention.
These Literatures are doubly marginal, inside the context both of Lusophone and of Asian literatures, since their belonging is ambiguous, and their corpus still needs to be fully known through archival work. The production of those Asian spaces has often been posited in independent terms (literature of Macao, Goan literature); other territories are undergoing an identification phase (East-Timor); and others are still not considered from this perspective (Mozambique), even if pertaining to an Afro-Asian platform of material circulation and symbolic goods. As regards authors, an ethnic/national criterion cannot be followed since the authors have plural origins: they may be native, luso-descendants, or from creole communities and the territories to which they belong are either not nation states or still early in a process of national consolidation. Portuguese authors that have a strong connection, biographical or other, to the territories of Mozambique, Malacca, Goa, Macao and EastTimor, but also territories who never were colonized by Portugal such as Japan, Thailand and other parts of Southeast Asia should be considered, since there are continuous writing traditions in Portuguese about those territories. While we are particularly interested in comparative studies, proposals that focus on individual territories or authors are welcome.
Please submit your abstract by May 2, 2022 to:
Duarte Drumond Braga: duartedbraga@gmail.com
Or
Paul Castro: paul.castro@glasgow.ac.uk
A Abelha da China – CCCM
O Centro Científico e Cultural de Macau vai assinalar, no próximo dia 12 de setembro, o bicentenário de “A Abelha da China”, o primeiro jornal de língua portuguesa a ser publicado em Macau, marcando o início da imprensa periódica no território.
O programa da evocação desta importante efeméride, no contexto da Revolução Liberal de 1820 e da primeira formulação do constitucionalismo português, inclui uma sessão com intervenções de cinco investigadores de Portugal, China e Brasil, que se têm dedicado ao estudo daquele período histórico e, em concreto, da imprensa em Macau.
Na ocasião, será lançado um livro – “A Abelha da China nos seus 200 Anos: Casos, Personagens e Confrontos na Experiência Liberal de Macau” – coordenado por Duarte Drumond Braga e Hugo Pinto, que reúne artigos da autoria dos investigadores: Cátia Miriam Costa, Jin Guoping, Jorge de Abreu Arrimar, Pablo Magalhães, e Tereza Sena. Esta edição, que inaugura a nova coleção de livros de História com chancela do Centro Científico e Cultural de Macau, é feita em parceria com a Universidade de Macau.