Module overview
Based on written texts, films and visual materials from and about Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, this course is intended to show you the cutting edge of cultural production and research from the Portuguese-speaking world, while remaining anchored in the essential themes and trends of the global twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. To this end, the course takes one thematic mainstay of the Portuguese-speaking world during the last century — the body — and uses it as a unifying motif and point of departure for study of a diverse, unique and comprehensive range of themes.
Alongside the set primary texts for the course, during lectures you will be introduced to a range of critical frameworks through which those texts can be understood, such as queer theory, theories of photography, cultural disability theory, and theories of colonisation and postcolonial identity. This aspect of the course will allow you to forge connections between the Portuguese-speaking world and wider global thought, as well as offering you introductory starting points for potential future study. In addition, applications and evaluations of these frameworks will provide the basis for assessed blog posts, which will allow you to develop your skills in writing for a lay audience, alongside the more typical skills of critical thinking, cultural analysis, and academic writing.