Assistant Professor of Portuguese and Spanish

Creative Transformations: Travels and Translations of Brazil in the Americas

Creative Transformations: Travels and Translations of Brazil in the Americas contends that translation is essential to Brazil’s visibility in the Americas, even when it does not seem like translation is explicitly or directly at stake. The project asks: To what extent is it possible to “translate Brazil”? What are the political implications of such a project? Who are these translators of Brazil, and how do they contribute to representations and interpretations of the nation? How does a focus on translation’s role in hemispheric exchanges contribute to our understanding of Brazil’s place in the Americas? I conceive of translation broadly as a linguistic, literary, and cultural process that recognizes the creative agency of Brazilian artists and intellectuals to transform languages, ideas, and cultures encountered during their hemispheric travels. Focusing on links between travel and translation reveals the transnational underpinnings of Brazilian literature and culture. Creative Transformations draws together a diverse corpus of Brazilian literature and culture, including transnational periodicals, a modernist masterpiece and its adaptations, and contemporary criticism and fiction, to construct an original genealogy of the translation of Brazil in the Americas. My project also aims to expand existing understandings of Latinx studies by underscoring the presence of Brazilians in the United States since the nineteenth century and their interactions with Spanish Americans.