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The article investigates how José Eduardo Agualusa and Luís Cardoso, often classified as “Lusophone writers,” contribute to problematizing the very concept of Lusophony. The author draws on the debate sparked in Macau, within the context of the “Rota das Letras,” linking the literary discussion to the postcolonial tensions inherent in narratives of identity belonging. Methodologically, it combines a brief contextualization of the authors and their works with the reconstitution and analysis of transcribed excerpts from a conversation held during the festival, privileging the arguments of the dialogue as interpretive material. The text argues that Lusophony, by often being presupposed as a cultural community and a horizon of communion among peoples, tends to conceal the diversity of desires, strategies, and aesthetic projects that traverse the spaces of writing in the Portuguese language. The analysis highlights relevant differences between the Timorese and Angolan cases: while literature in Portuguese in Timor emerges marked by functions of resistance and linguistic continuity, Agualusa and Cardoso, from different trajectories, problematize the idea of a single matrix, suggesting a plural, heterogeneous, and politically situated Lusophony.

The article analyzes, from a historical-cultural perspective, the pleasures and leisure activities in Macau during the early decades of the twentieth century, discussing how European modernization and the colonial conjuncture influenced practices of sociability, education, and consumption of entertainment in a peripheral context. Arguing that, despite the apparent administrative “apathy” and relative isolation from the “surrounding world,” Macau mobilized specific policies and social dynamics, the author frames ludic experiences within a broader transformation of customs, uncertainty about the future, and the search for alternative forms of enjoyment. Methodologically, it employs a historiographic reading based on published sources and printed documentation, articulating legislation and measures related to teaching and lifelong education with indicators of local prosperity and living standards. As main conclusions, the text highlights the existence of a colonial economy marked by monopolies and revenues (such as opium and gambling), which fueled a “prosperity” capable of sustaining leisure; it also identifies a spatially segmented city between Christian and Chinese areas, where different urban environments conditioned distinct forms of entertainment. Thus, the article interprets leisure as historical practices linked to economic structures and cultural reorganizations of the period.

This article analyzes, from a textual and linguistic perspective, the Japanese grammar **Arte Breve da Lingoa Iapoa** (1620), published in Macau by João Rodrigues, with the aim of identifying its main characteristics and the underlying linguistic vision. Based on a comparative **textual research** between the **Arte Breve** and the author’s earlier work (**Arte da Lingoa de Iapam**), the study reconstructs how Rodrigues redefines the teaching of Japanese for European beginners in the missionary and intercultural mediation context. Methodologically, the article examines editorial and pedagogical choices (structure, reorganization of content, and degree of condensation), as well as theoretical decisions, especially the relationship between the description of Japanese and the Latin grammatical tradition. The results show that the **Arte Breve** represents a significant turning point: (i) it partially breaks away from structural dependence on the Latin model by proposing a system more suited to the study of Japanese; (ii) it **strategically integrates writing** and the learning of letters/syllabaries at the beginning of the manual; and (iii) it reconfigures grammatical categories, such as the notion of **article** (understood as a particle) and aspects of **conjugation** (including past-tense auxiliaries). It is concluded that the work, although Latinizing in terminology, reveals a functional and pedagogical orientation aimed at learners, reflecting a conception of Japanese that prioritizes the operational description of linguistic phenomena.

This article analyzes the "echoes of the Orient" in "Lapis Lazuli," a poem by W. B. Yeats included in Last Poems (1936–1939), proposing that the evocation of a Chinese sculptural piece in lapis lazuli functions less as decorative exoticization and more as an aesthetic mechanism to reconfigure the relationship between tragedy, historical repetition, and cultural continuity. The author reads the poem in a comparative and intertextual manner, situating it within the context of other Yeatsian meditations on artistic objects, and articulating references to the Middle and Far East—including the funerary symbolism of the stone, as well as the presence of the "Chinamen" as figures of longevity and reconstruction. Methodologically, the analysis employs close reading and a critical framework of Oriental imagery, tracing how Yeats shifts the notion of the "tragic" toward an ethics of heroic joy: the instability of creations ("All things fall and are built again") is countered by a cultural productivity that transforms decline into renewal. The conclusion is that the poem turns the Orient into a mirror of the Western artistic task, where permanence depends on the ability to "raise the cry" in the midst of despair, and where art paradoxically provides solutions to suffering.

Clara Sarmento's article analyzes Jorge Barbosa's "Poem of the Sea" as an expression of the Cape Verdean worldview elaborated by the Claridade movement. Arguing that the text articulates a "divided desire" — the urge for escape in the face of the land's harshness — the author situates the work in the context of the 1930s, when the claridosos sought to break with their subalternity vis-à-vis metropolitan models and confer aesthetic autonomy upon insular creation. Methodologically, the reading proceeds through historical-literary contextualization and through thematic and linguistic exegesis of the poem, in dialogue with other texts by Barbosa and with the cultural matrix of Claridade. Among the principal conclusions, the author maintains that the Islands, in the "Poem of the Sea," appear de-romanticized ("rocks, sands, and hills"), while the sea is simultaneously prison and pathway to the horizon: it "expands dreams and stifles desires," "prompts prayers," and instates the nostalgia of the "distant land" mediated by images and cinema. The social drama — drought, famine, emigration, and isolation — is refracted in intimacy ("within us all"), converting landscape into existential language. Thus, the poem achieves an alchemy between "the here and the there," fusing the outer sea with the inner sea and transforming the conflict between leaving and staying into a poetic identity nucleus.

This article analyzes the attempts of the Italian Jesuit Carlo Spinola to reach the Indian Ocean (the "State of India") within the context of oceanic routes and missionary narratives of the late sixteenth century. Through a comparative reading of Spinola's letters addressed to the Superior General Claudio Acquaviva and the account attributed to Father Gaspar Afonso (incorporated into contemporary shipwreck repertoires), Daniele Frison seeks to explain why seemingly marginal episodes in Spinola's biography were narrated with such great detail and apologetic value. The study argues that the writings of Spinola and Afonso must be understood in light of a missionary methodology specific to the Society of Jesus, in which epistolary reporting and printed circulation functioned as "media" to legitimize enterprises, convert misadventures into proof of faith, and inscribe success (or the reorientation of the journey) within an economy of religious reputation. Methodologically, the author compares chronologies, themes, and modes of narration, while simultaneously acknowledging the differences between the two descriptions and the vicissitudes that separated the travelers along the way. It concludes that the voyage, marked by disasters and detours, was transformed into a historiographical and theological argument: even when the immediate objective is not achieved, the "contrary" outcome is read as glorious, reinforcing the value of the mission and the permanence of the evangelizing purpose.

This article examines how the Jesuit mission in Japan was established and consolidated thanks to a trans-imperial "network" articulated by Gaspar do Amaral, framing this activity within the broader set of economic, spiritual, and institutional connections of the Society of Jesus. Drawing on documentation already identified in archives such as the National Library of the Ajuda Palace (Lisbon) and the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (Rome), the author proposes a historiographical reading centered on financing and logistics: the Japanese mission appears as dependent on revenues generated in the Estado da Índia, especially in Bassein and the rents associated with the *caçabés* of various localities along the Indian coast, as well as on monetary contributions diverted from the revenues of the Mumbai archipelago. Methodologically, the study articulates accounting series and internal inventories of the Province of India (e.g., summaries of colleges, residences, and expenses) to reconstruct resource flows, budgetary tensions, and forms of fund mobilization. The main conclusions emphasize that the viability of the mission in Japan cannot be explained solely by local dynamics, but rather by the interdependence among missions, colleges, and economic circuits: the contribution of the Japanese mission and the Japanese diaspora emerges as a decisive factor both for the "unfolding" and for the institutional "settlement" in Tun Kim. The text thus demonstrates that the Jesuit expansion into Japan was sustained by global financial engineering, in which Macao and the Indian network functioned as essential platforms.

Starting from the premise that the "act of presenting food" is equivalent to presenting culture, this article proposes to read Macao through a specific visual mediation: A-Cheng's ink-and-wash caricatures. Rather than privileging gustatory perception, the images activate a reception based on sight and reconducted memory. The author argues that, although A-Cheng is primarily known as a cartoonist, his paintings retain an archival sensibility and a "point of memory," fixing on paper everyday scenes and affective collections associated with a Macao in transformation. Methodologically, the text articulates iconographic analysis and theoretical discussion on cultural memory (between "lieux de mémoire" and "post-memory"), relating pictorial technique (ink and wash with double lines, colors, and caricatural disproportions) to processes of Sino-Portuguese hybridization. It concludes that food—treated as a motif and not merely as a theme—functions as an intersection between past and present, individual and collective, allowing one to "taste" Macao through visual language. Thus, "Macanese cuisine," understood as a fragment of broader historical dynamics, reveals itself as an interpretive key for understanding the persistence of tradition and the burlesque dramatization of everyday life.

Fernanda Dias's article presents a set of "reading notes" on Mo Yan's novel *Peito Grande, ancas Largas* (*Feng ru fei tun*, 1996), articulating it with the author's literary biography and with recurrent aesthetic lines in his oeuvre. The author argues that the book's singularity lies not only in its social and sexual charge, often associated with controversy and censorship, but above all in a form of narrative recomposition marked by tensions between memory, absurdity, and historical-social critique. The methodology combines interpretive reading and contextualization: starting from Mo Yan's trajectory, from discussions on dignity and "relations" in literary creation, and from the formal strategies present in his fiction, the analysis reexamines how the novel mobilizes procedures of distortion, exaggeration, and metamorphosis to inscribe a complex experience of the twentieth-century China. Among the results, the article highlights the "unorthodox perspective on historical facts" as the driving force of the literary effect, as well as the text's capacity to transcend cultural boundaries without relying on direct influences from external models. It concludes that *Peito Grande, ancas Largas* exemplifies the ambition and aesthetic weight characteristic of Mo Yan, converting the regional into a key for reading a fragmented Chinese modernity.

The article asks "Macao, a multicultural city?" and seeks to answer this question through the literary analysis of the final (posthumous) novel by Henrique de Senna Fernandes, **Os Dores**, fictionally set in the 1940s and 1950s. The central thesis maintains that the city can be read as a space of encounter between **East and West** since Portuguese governance in the sixteenth century, and that this history materializes in the novel through "marks of multiculturality" expressed by characters, spaces, customs, and social relations. Methodologically, the work articulates a theoretical framework on multiculturalism with the interpretive reading of the literary text, conceiving the novel as a privileged source for the representation of diversity and alterity in concrete historical contexts. Subsequently, an analytical and practical approach is undertaken, aimed at identifying and discussing, within the narrative and descriptive configurations of **Os Dores**, the signs of cultural coexistence, its tensions, and forms of social negotiation. It is concluded that Macao, as staged by Senna Fernandes, is not a mere exotic setting, but a cultural device in which colonial continuities, the circulation of influences, and modes of coexistence are simultaneously recognized — allowing multiculturality to be characterized as a historical hallmark of the city.

The article examines the “secret language” inscribed in the love letter of the character Lu Si-yuan in Maria Ondina Braga’s *Nocturno em Macau*. The author argues that the letter constitutes a privileged object of expressive silence: although materially “visible,” it remains inaccessible to most, functioning as an illegible or indecipherable enigma. Drawing on a theoretical reflection on secrecy and silence (drawing, among others, on Derrida), the text proposes that deciphering the subtext does not eliminate the mystery but reorganizes the reading experience, transforming the spoken into a space of ineffability. Methodologically, the analysis combines textual reading (focusing on the letter scene and its reception by the narrator/character) with narratological and autobiographical frameworks. The article further links the letter to the “autobiographical pact” in a broad sense (Lejeune), arguing that, in Braga’s work, autobiography is constructed in an incomplete and open manner: memory, diary, chronicle, and novel converge, demanding an interpretative initiative from the reader. It concludes that the letter brings about a transmutation of materiality into suspended signs, preserving the modesty necessary for the affective denouement and offering the reader a “space” where silence — more than the message — organizes meaning.

This article proposes a comparative analysis of the evolution of Malacca and Macao as Portuguese ports, focusing on the preservation of maritime cultural heritage. Arguing that maritime history constitutes the material and symbolic foundation of the urban, commercial, and social development of both cities, the authors maintain that the inscription of the "Historic Centre of Macao" as World Heritage is insufficient because it fails to adequately integrate the structuring role of the maritime matrix—Portuguese and Chinese—in the formation and continuity of its significance as a port. Methodologically, the study employs a comparative approach grounded in documentary research and a critical-interpretive reading of the material record, articulating evidence associated with port structures and heritage policies, as well as an examination of contemporary museological devices that shape public perception of maritime memory. The findings indicate that, in Macao, tangible evidence exists not only in spaces dedicated to the maritime sector (for example, the Maritime Museum), but also in the urban layout and planning designed to maximize port functions; however, the heritage narrative tends to shift historical prominence to later industries. In the case of Malacca, the discovery of archaeological remains from the Ming period and references to structures linked to the fleets of Zheng He reinforce the need to understand the complex network of exchanges and maritime infrastructures. The article thus concludes by asserting the urgency of heritage policies that fully recognize the maritime "witness" as part of the common heritage of humanity.

The article reconstructs and interprets the presence of Alexandre de Rhodes (1591/93–1660) in Macau, proposing a new reading of his status as the "first Frenchman" to live and work in the city for more than twelve years. Drawing on a historiographical approach centered on biographical reconstruction and critical analysis of missionary itineraries, the author articulates the documentation produced by the Jesuit himself (memoirs and writings) with the institutional context of the Portuguese Padroado, the Atlantic-Asian dynamics of the Goa routes, and the political conditions of the missions in Vietnam. The research demonstrates that his arrival in Macau in 1623 should not be understood as a peripheral episode, but rather as a point of logistical and linguistic articulation for Jesuit expansion. By highlighting the importance of learning Vietnamese, the author reveals the difference between missionary practices mediated by interpreters and the strategy of cultural integration that Rhodes sought to develop. It concludes that his work in Macau functioned simultaneously as a platform for recruitment, training, and circulation of knowledge, influencing how evangelization in Tonkin and Cochinchina was consolidated—within a context of instability, expulsions, and rivalries among local powers.

This article examines the “translatability” of Chinese poetry into Portuguese and other Western languages, arguing that assessing this possibility depends, first of all, on recognizing the spatiotemporal situatedness of languages. Starting from the idea that language is a historically located social fact, the text argues that the translation of classical Chinese poetry requires defining “which” Chinese is at stake (at least in diachronic, geographic, and sociopolitical terms), since the very notion of language often eludes strictly linguistic boundaries. The analysis discusses, as an example, the implications of the ideographic writing system and the tendency, common in Western receptions, to confuse characters with pictograms/ideograms, which fosters exoticization and mythification of Chinese writing. Based on theoretical references and a critical reading of translation discourses, the article mobilizes the case of the translator Camilo Pessanha and his comments on the incompatibility between the art of the ideogram and European phonetic writing. It concludes that the difficulties and possibilities of translation derive not only from linguistic correspondences but also from cultural frameworks and power relations inscribed in the history of languages and their receptions.

The article examines the Jewish presence in the Portuguese Far East throughout the sixteenth century, taking as its interpretive axis the diaspora of the Perez family and, in particular, the case of Ruy Perez, a mercantile figure associated with Macau, Nagasaki, and Manila. The main thesis holds that the descendants of Jews converted to Catholicism—designated “New Christians” in Portuguese documentation—constituted strategic actors in European commercial expansion in Asia, mobilizing family networks and capital to face both opportunities and life risks within a predominantly Christian European context under inquisitorial surveillance. Methodologically, the study is based on historiographical research guided by unpublished documentation (to be published by the author) and by the analysis of the juridical-religious vocabulary of Portuguese sources, justifying the use of the term “New Christian” instead of “converso.” The reconstruction of Ruy Perez’s trajectory allows for mapping the continuities and reconfigurations of Sephardic commercial practices among different Asian ports and highlights how state policy and the control mechanisms of the “world of faith” conditioned mobilities, investments, and survival strategies. It concludes that the Sephardic network in Southeast Asia and the Far East was decisive for regional economic dynamics and reveals the social complexity and tensions inherent in Luso-Asian mobility in the sixteenth century.

Marking the centenary of the birth of Deolinda da Conceição (1913), Maria de Lurdes N. Escaleira proposes a critical-historiographical reading of her literary and journalistic production, arguing that the author's short stories and chronicles constitute a "route of emotions" that allows us to understand the daily life of Macao at decisive moments—from the Sino-Japanese War to the post-Second World War period—as well as to observe the way in which her writing stages women's struggle for freedom, equal opportunities, and social recognition. The article articulates textual analysis with historical contextualization, drawing on publications surrounding the newspaper *Notícias de Macau*, especially the set of narratives gathered in *Cheong-Sam. A Cabaia*, and on Deolinda's role as a contributor and editor responsible for a supplement dedicated to the condition of women. Among the findings, the emphasis stands out on an emotional realism that bears witness to lived "dramas," the valorization of the print press as an instrument for defending interests and for the dissemination of information and culture, and the formulation of a conception of the "modern woman" in which feminine difference is not denied but affirmed in parity with competence and autonomy. The article concludes that the author occupies a significant place in Macao's cultural history, articulating literature, the press, and emancipatory claims.

The article “De Pernas para o Ar,” by Mo Yan, explores the seemingly banal scene of a reunion among former classmates, narrated from an episode in a hotel lounge, in order to unveil mechanisms of power, social discipline, and desire underlying the “etiquettes” of everyday life. The argument departs from the contrast between corporeality and gestures (the hasty rising, the laughter that commands conduct, the staging of Western courtesy) and the persistence of informal hierarchies anchored in language, nicknames, and complicity. Methodologically, the interpretation mobilizes close reading of discourse and social performance in the text: the analysis of the jocular tone, irony, and direct interactions reveals how authority becomes “natural” through minor impositions and ritual exchanges, culminating in tensions between submission, constraint, and resistance. As main conclusions, the article argues that the “ar” (air) of the title—associated with the act of inverting the body’s position—functions as a metaphor for moral instability and role reversal: those who appear to obey also participate in the control machinery, while laughter and protocol operate as instruments of social governance. Thus, the narrative transforms the fraternization into a historical-cultural microcosm, in which the past re-enacts relations of domination in the present.

The article analyzes how Deolinda da Conceição, in short stories such as “Cheong-Sam,” stages the relationship between trauma and memory within the historical context of Macau during the Pacific War. Departing from the premise that colonial and nationalist violences continually displace the conditions of identity representation, the author proposes that fictional writing creates a borderland “domestic space,” wherein the annihilating past returns in the form of disturbing images and liminal experiences. Methodologically, the text articulates a close reading of the short stories with theoretical frameworks from postcolonial theory (in dialogue with Homi Bhabha), privileging the narrative mechanisms of the irruption of the uncanny, the dream, and the haunting as devices of mnemonic reconstitution. As central evidence, the figure of the cheong-sam, associated with the ghost of a dead woman, functions as an icon of a memory of extermination: violence silences the victim, yet the trace persists, pursuing and destabilizing certainty regarding the authorship of the crime. The article concludes that eschatological revenge and doubt (“was that crime really hers?”) reveal the rupture of familial norms and the fabrication of subjects in a state of exception, thereby enabling the interpretation of Deolinda’s literature as an affective archive of Macanese trauma and as a critique of the regimes of power that produce it.

This article revisits the cartography and historical documentation of commerce in the "Foreign Quarter" of Canton between 1760 and 1843, challenging the historiographical belief that three continuous commercial streets—New China Street, (Old) China Street, and Hog Lane—existed throughout much of the late modern period. The central thesis contends that, during this interval, only two streets structured retail and supply in the sector controlled by foreigners: the thoroughfare later associated with China Street (originating in 1760) and Hog Lane (recognized by sources at least since the 1740s). Methodologically, the author undertakes a critical comparative reading of maps, travel accounts, European archival records, and iconographic evidence (plans and views of the factories), confronting the names, locations, and chronologies attributed in secondary works with primary sources. The results indicate that "New China Street" did not constitute a third functional artery prior to 1822; it appears after the fire that destroyed the factories, when access was redefined and a new street was established in the context of reconstruction. Thus, the review clarifies the policy of segregation and surveillance of the Co-hong (公行) and contributes to a more precise reconstruction of the commercial geography of foreign Canton.

The article proposes ten historiographical observations on the Chinese presence in Malacca and Manila in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, discussing how Iberian Europeans mobilized information concerning merchants and Sino-Southeast Asian networks to define expansion strategies. The argument contends that "Chinchéus" and "Sangleys" do not merely designate ethnic groups, but rather categories collected and re-signified in Portuguese and Spanish sources, functioning as indicators of commercial access, diplomatic potential, and geopolitical knowledge about "China." The method consists of a comparative critical reading of chronicle accounts and period reports, articulating them with the context of the conquest and consolidation of Luso-Spanish positions in the region. In Malacca, the integration of Chinese merchants is presented as a factor of success: they informed, mediated, and influenced decisions, including in the transition toward the military resolution of the local conflict. In Manila, one observes the persistence of expectations of direct contact with "China," in a scenario of correction of imperial goals after frustrated experiences in the Visayas. The main conclusions emphasize the selective circulation of knowledge concerning ships, wealth, frequency of voyages, and religion, as well as the role of Chinese intermediaries in constructing the possibilities of Iberian imperial continuity in the Far East.