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This article examines the emergence and evolution of a Portuguese literary tradition in Macao, contextualizing its development within the broader shifts of Portuguese imperial policy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Following the loss of Brazil and heightened colonial competition in Africa, Portugal’s "Asian lobby" successfully advocated for the retention and modernization of Macao, leading to an increased expatriate presence and the introduction of modern educational institutions. Brookshaw argues that prior to the twentieth century, Macao’s Portuguese-language literary expression was primarily an oral tradition rooted in the Macanese Creole (*Patuá*), as earlier visitors like Camões and Bocage left little thematic imprint of the territory in their work. The subsequent development of a formal written literature is characterized by two distinct *fin-de-siècle* periods and is deeply intertwined with a uniquely Portuguese form of "Orientalism." Through the lens of major figures—most notably the symbolist poet Camilo Pessanha—the author explores how the East functioned as a reflective site for negotiating Portuguese national identity and anxieties regarding imperial decline. By analyzing the transition from a de facto autonomous enclave to an integrated part of Portugal’s "third empire," the article highlights how Macao’s literary voices mirrored the tension between historical greatness and the modern colonial reality.

在此书评中，David Brookshaw审视了当代澳大利亚著名作家Brian Castro的《上海之舞》（2003）。Brookshaw将该作品定位为一部雄心勃勃的“虚构自传”，记述了Castro家族自20世纪30年代至60年代间跨越上海、香港与澳门的错综历史，并上溯至17世纪的葡荷冲突。书评着重强调了Castro的后现代手法，尤其是他将档案照片与家族记忆相融合、从而消解历史事实与虚构创作之间界限的精湛技艺。 Brookshaw深入探讨了小说在葡亚散居语境下的核心主题：去根化、混杂性以及身份认同的流动性。分析中相当篇幅聚焦于“舞蹈”这一隐喻，书评者将其解读为多层面的象征——既是存在意义上的庆典，也是一种过渡仪式，同时还是作者祖先所面临的“困缚之仪”。最终，Brookshaw将该小说视为一部“杰作”，是对葡人在东亚经历的罕见文学书写。通过将个人谱系与更广阔的历史变迁——包括日本占领及1997年香港回归——交织在一起，Castro被呈现为一位通过流散与永恒重生之叙事成功重塑自身历史的作家。

This article examines the literary output of Brian Castro, one of Australia’s most prominent contemporary novelists, within the context of his multifaceted cultural heritage. Born on a ferry between Macao and Hong Kong to parents of Portuguese, Chinese, and English descent, Castro’s work is deeply informed by themes of hybridity, dislocation, and the "third space." Brookshaw argues that Castro’s preoccupation with "disinheritance" is not a source of loss but a liberating catalyst for creative reinvention. Drawing parallels between Castro and the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, the study explores how the author subverts essentialist labels and traditional notions of Australian national identity. Central to this analysis is the metaphor of "African chicken"—a Luso-tropical pastiche that embodies the "Creolising of forgetting and memory." By examining the intersection of autobiography, history, and fiction, the article demonstrates how Castro utilizes the power of imagination to fill the gaps of a fragmented past. Ultimately, Brookshaw posits that Castro’s novels offer a transformative vision of multiculturalism, where the lack of a fixed inheritance allows for the active and autonomous construction of individual identity through storytelling.

The article examines the "energy" of plot and the act of narrating in post-colonial fiction, arguing that competing stories—rather than merely the valorization of orality—reveal social and political dynamics that resist essentialism. Drawing on Richard Kearney's formulations concerning the power of narratives to shape fragmented events and produce communal identity, as well as Michael Jackson's distinction between canonical stories that reinforce boundaries and narrative practices that dissolve or transgress them, the author proposes that the apparent tension between collective cohesion and individual difference can be productive, and is verifiable in two literary cases. Methodologically, the text brings Brian Castro and Mia Couto into dialogue through a comparative and contextualized reading, articulating narrative poetics with biographical trajectories marked by cultural "in-betweenness" and processes of decolonization. The works analyzed evince procedures of self-invention, identity ambiguity, and reconfiguration of national and linguistic belongings, refusing stories "imposed from above" and opening space for multiple points of view. The conclusion is that, in Castro and Couto, storytelling functions simultaneously as a mechanism of meaning-making and as a critique of totalizing categories, transforming narrative into a device of resistance and rewriting of the post-colonial.

João de Pina-Cabral’s *Between China and Europe: Person, Culture and Emotion in Macao* is presented as a distinctive contribution to historical and social anthropology, extending the author’s earlier work on Macanese identity and its shifting relation to Portuguese and Chinese heritages. The review emphasizes the book’s central analytic claim: Macao’s social history is repeatedly reconfigured by “incidents” that alter Portuguese–Chinese governance and, in turn, transform how Macanese people understand their own cultural practices. Drawing on field-based insights and sustained historical observation, the study links well-known turning points—particularly the consolidation of formal colonial rule in 1846 under Ferreira do Amaral and its reversal in 1966–67—to symbolic sites and commemorative practices, including statues of colonial figures and monuments whose meanings exceed their official intentions. The review highlights Pina-Cabral’s ability to connect political events to lived emotion and collective memory, showing how local accommodation, resentment, and cultural nuance emerged under changing imperial pressures. Key findings thus foreground the performative power of material symbols (even when plans fail) in mediating personhood, emotion, and cultural affiliation between China and Europe across the nineteenth, twentieth, and early post-1999 periods.

This article investigates how the urban fiction of Henrique de Senna Fernandes and Leung Ping-kwan mobilizes the cityscape to reflect on social change and the construction of regional identities in Macau and Hong Kong, particularly against the backdrop of the political and cultural transformations of the late twentieth century. The central argument posits that, although urban nostalgia is a recurring trait in Chinese literatures and even comparable to those of other metropolises, the case of Macau and Hong Kong renders this nostalgia inseparable from specific historical conjunctures: the peripheral status of the cities and their dual position as cosmopolitan centers of cultural encounter. Methodologically, Brookshaw proceeds with a comparative reading of the two authors’ works, articulating literary analysis (including differences in realism, narrative structure, and stylistic effects) with cultural geography and social history, in order to relate representational strategies to uses of territory. The article concludes that Fernandes, associated with a more conventional realism crossed with romanticism, tends to reconstitute an “anterior past” in which hierarchies and ties between zones—the “Chinese city” and the “Christian city”—appear less threatened by contemporary ruptures. In contrast, Leung’s writing, with its looser narrative structures and influences from the nouveau roman, dramatizes the city as a space in continuous mutation, highlighting new forms of sociability and disintegration. Thus, the texts function as imaginative archives that inscribe urbanity into the region’s history.

The article proposes a redefinition of "Macau literature" that transcends the canonical categories of fiction, poetry, and theater. It is argued that any attempt at delimitation must consider, in particular, the centrality of journalism and essayistic writing in the Portuguese language, whose institutionalization dates back to the early nineteenth century, with periodicals that, in addition to disseminating diverse political positions, consolidated discursive practices recurrent in local cultural production. Secondly, the text emphasizes the importance of genres marked by Macau's translocal condition: reportage and travel literature, as well as autobiographical accounts associated with the memory of the territory and the identitarian sensibility of the Macanese. Methodologically, the approach articulates theoretical framing and contextual reading of representative cases, mobilizing examples from Portuguese, Chinese, and transcultural authors, as well as debates on the language and origin of writers. Among the findings, it is noteworthy that Macanese literary identity is structured around a productive tension between singularity and plurality: on the one hand, the plurality of languages (Portuguese and Chinese) and of editorial circuits; on the other, the singularity of the "Macau backdrop" as a historical and cultural experience, including contemporary visions such as the dual heritage thematized on the eve of the 1999 transfer.

This article analyzes the construction and circulation of Macanese identity within a diasporic context, arguing that it was shaped less as a fixed "essence" than as a cultural performance situated between colonial empires. Drawing on the case of Macau’s Eurasian community—often self-identified as Portuguese, yet marked by Cantonese linguistic and everyday influences as well as transregional commercial networks—the text frames the discussion within recent debates on the "characteristics" of Macanese identity. The investigation particularly reads Henrique de Senna Fernandes’s fiction as a literary device that stages this intermediary position: a loyalty to the colonial status quo accompanied by a selective absorption of Chinese repertoires and those from other Lusophone geographies (India and Southeast Asia). Methodologically, the article links interpretive analysis of literary discourse with a critical review of anthropological and historical-cultural contributions on Macanese identity, emphasizing the relationship between belonging, social class, and historical adaptation throughout the twentieth century. It concludes that "fiction" functions both as the elaboration of an identity myth and as an archive of the diaspora’s internal tensions, revealing how the group’s survival depended on ongoing negotiations between a "Portuguese" heritage, reconfigurations in the face of Chinese growing influence, and strategies of social acceptance.

This article examines how the fiction of Henrique de Senna Fernandes constructs "lives" and modes of living in the territory of Macao under historical and political tensions, articulating politicization, patriarchy, expectations of "progress," and post-colonial problematics. Starting from the author's singular position as a "son of the land" (born in 1923 into a Macanese family with plural roots), the text argues that his writing—though often anchored in first-person short stories and novellas recalled from the post-war period—functions as a cultural chronicle of the almost-past, capable of revealing social continuities and epochal fractures. The methodology combines intrinsic literary reading with historical-cultural contextualization: the study observes configurations of power in gender relations, the narrative regimes of transmission (stories told, collected, and retold), and the manner in which certain images of modernization coexist with persistent hierarchies. It concludes that, by representing life in Macao before and after decisive turning points (the Japanese occupation, the instability of the 1960s, the 1974 Revolution, and the transition period), Senna Fernandes not only preserves local memory; he also exposes, through fictional means, the way in which politics and patriarchy organize everyday life, producing an implicit—and often ambivalent—critique of colonial narratives and the promises of development that succeeded them.

This article examines how food functions as a vehicle for nostalgia and cultural preservation in Henrique de Senna Fernandes’s fiction, focusing on the role of cuisine in *A Trança Feiticeira*. Building from broader accounts of Macanese culinary history, the study situates “Cozinhaçã” as a frontier cuisine shaped by Portuguese adaptation and successive influences from Malay, Indian, African, and Chinese traditions. Methodologically, the article reads Senna Fernandes’s culinary references as textual markers of identity work: dishes, ingredients, and eating practices are treated not merely as atmospheric detail, but as narrative devices that stage memory, belonging, and the fragility of cultural continuity. The argument is that culinary discourse in the novel performs a dual task. On the one hand, it maps Macao’s historical position within oceanic and diasporic networks, using food to demonstrate mixture and reinvention. On the other, it mourns the loss—or threatened disappearance—of specific “home-town” recipes by linking them to family life, religious occasions, and communal gatherings. The article concludes that in Senna Fernandes’s writing, cuisine becomes an archive of sensory heritage, transforming everyday eating into a literary strategy for maintaining cultural uniqueness amid rapid social and political change.

David Brookshaw's article analyzes Julian Lees's novel **The Fan Tan Players**, arguing that **Macao** constitutes the narrative's nuclear space, functioning simultaneously as the point of departure and return for its protagonists between 1928 and 1945. In light of comparison with Lusophone Macanese fiction—particularly authors such as **Rodrigo Leal de Carvalho** and **Henrique de Senna Fernandes**—the study contends that Lees mobilizes familiar configurations (geographical and chronological mobility; the presence of "White" refugees in post-Bolshevik-revolution China) yet reconfigures the types and the tone: in contrast to figures marked by melancholy and fragility, the novel privileges a **romantic regime of persistent love**, in a register more attuned to hope and attachment. Methodologically, the article proceeds through **interpretive and contextual reading**, highlighting the way in which Macao's **cultural topography**—sensations, social habits, and linguistic diversity—is worked through a choral cast of expatriates, friendships, and communal practices. Brookshaw concludes that the title alludes to the local imaginary of gambling (fan tan) above all as a **metaphor of contingency** (luck, coincidence, and probability), while the representation of Macao as a "home" relatively less hierarchical than Hong Kong simultaneously evinces an adherence to colonial myths and an implicit critique of the dynamics of prejudice.

The central focus of the article is an interpretation of Brian Castro’s novel,

The last novel by Henrique de Senna Fernandes, A Noite Desceu em Dezembro, was first published in its entirety in 2015, although parts of it had previously appeared in instalments in the Macao weekly, Ponto Final, as part of a project to resurrect the feuilleton genre and, more generally, encourage Portuguese literature in Macao. Although unfinished, this novel contains themes that are consistent with the author’s more well-known works, such as the novels, A Trança Feiticeira and Amor e Dedinhos de Pé, as well as his shorter fictions. It also signals an evolution in his attitude, as a Macanese, towards the overwhelming Chinese presence in the city, as well as in his consideration of the role of females in Macao society. This contribution discusses the development of the author’s treatment of such themes and includes a translation of an excerpt from the novel by way of an illustration.