Pondering Portuguese
PORTUGUESE has many homes. It is spoken in Portugal, Brazil, Mozambique, Angola, and East Timor, and also in Framingham and New Bedford -- the result of colonial conquest and modern-day immigration. The language is part of a multi continent culture that will be the intellectual heart of a new doctoral program in Portuguese studies at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.
While science and technology tend to make headlines, UMass-Dartmouth's Luso-Afro-Brazilian Studies and Theory program marks progress in the humanities and social sciences. "Luso-" is for Lusitania, an ancient Roman province that roughly matches the location of modern Portugal.
Scheduled to start in September, the program rests on a solid foundation: UMass-Dartmouth already has a Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, a master's degree program, and the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives.
The field is a study of how cultures collide.
Writing during her time in Brazil in 1821, Maria Graham, a British woman, describes a mix of colonialism, politics, elitism, and looming upheaval: "The European Portuguese are extremely anxious to avoid intermarriage with born Brazilians, and prefer giving their daughters and fortunes to the meanest clerk of European birth, rather than to the richest and most meritorious Brazilian," she writes. "They have become aware of the prodigious inconvenience, if not evil, they have brought on themselves by the importation of Africans, and now, no doubt, look forward with dread to the event of a revolution, which will free their slaves from their authority, and, by declaring them all men alike, will authorize them to resent the injuries they have so long and patiently borne."
More amiable cultural meetings can be find in the Ferreira-Mendes archives, which includes the papers of Alfred Lewis, a Portuguese-American writer who immigrated from the Azores in 1922, lived in California, and wrote a best-selling novel, "Home is an Island," published in 1951. Among the papers in the archive are unpublished works, including five novels and some 25 short stories.
The new PhD program also has local support from the Portuguese-speaking community of Southeastern Massachusetts. It has received funding from the Luso-American Foundation in Lisbon and from the Millennium bcpbank, which has branches in Massachusetts and is owned by a Portuguese financial company. And on June 22, President Anibal Cavaco Silva of Portugal is expected to visit the Portuguese studies department.
The program's contribution: It respects complexity. It is built upon the fact that culture is always in motion, always a conversation. And even when it seems to submit to invaders, it reemerges and colors local sensibilities.
