About
Thayse Leal Lima earned her PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies from Brown University in 2014. Her areas of specialization include twentieth-century and contemporary Brazilian literature and culture, Modern Latin American literature and intellectual history, transnationalism, and international literary circulation. Her book, Latino Americanizando o Brasil: A crítica Literária e o Diálogo Transnacional [Latin Americanizing Brazil: Literary Criticism and the Transnational Dialogue] was published by Editora UFPR (Federal University of Paraná Press) in 2021. The manuscript traces the dialogues between Hispanic American and Brazilian cultural and literary critics during the second half of the twentieth century, focusing on their efforts to integrate the two distinct Latin American literary traditions. Bringing forth new archival material that documents the infrastructure of transnational exchanges, she argues that the drive toward a continental paradigm goes beyond the ideological discourse of Latin American solidarity, relating also to politics of literary promotion, recognition, and internationalization. She is currently co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Lusophone Studies on the theme of Lusophone World Literature, published in Spring 2021. Her current research focuses on transnationalism and cosmopolitanism in Brazilian literature. Her articles and book reviews have appeared in journals such as Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Journal of World Literature among others. Education
2014, Ph.D., Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
2006, M.A., Brazilian Literature, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil
2003, B.A., Letras, Portuguese and Brazilian Language and Literature, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Publications
Book:
Latino Americanizando o Brasil: A crítica Literária e o Diálogo Transnacional [Latin Americanizing Brazil: Literary Criticism and the Transnational Dialogue]. Editora UFPR, 2021.
Selected Refereed Journal Articles
“Latin American Dialogues during the Cold War: The magazines Cadernos Brasileiros and Mundo Nuevo”. Thinking World Literature from Lusophone Perspectives, special issue of Journal of Lusophone Studies, 2021.
“South-South Exchanges: Biblioteca Ayacucho and Construction of a Transnational Literature”, Journal of World Literature, 2021, pp.1-21, doi:10.1163/24056480-20210001
“Translation and World Literature: The Perspective of the ‘Ex-Centric’ “. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, no. 26, 2017, pp. 461-481, doi:10.1080/13569325.2017.1351335
“Narrating the Past and Inventing the Future: Memory, History and Narrative in Pedro Páramo and Terra Sonâmbula”. Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, no. 27, 2015, pp. 222- 234. Upcoming Talks and Conferences
Brazilian Transnationalisms – Panel (co-organizer with Chloe Hill)
Conference Proposal accepted for BRASA Conference (Brazilian Studies Association), March 9-12, 2022 at Georgetown University in Washington DC
In recent years the transnational turn in academic research has brought about a significant reconfiguration of the geographical framework and methodological approaches in the Humanities and Social Sciences. One of the main outcomes have been in challenging the traditional reliance on discrete national formations as the main unit of analysis, remapping geopolitical and cultural spaces according to cross-border zones of contact and exchange. As such, transnational studies have contributed to the denaturalization of the common perception of the nation as a “fixed, implicitly timeless and always meaningful” community (Briggs, McCormick & Way, 2008).
The history of Brazil, as in other post-colonial nations, is inextricably linked with transnational dislocations, as was the case with the forceful African Diaspora led by the transatlantic slave trade in the 16th century; the Japanese and Italian immigration in the early 20th century, or contemporary migration of working-class Brazilians to Europe and the United States. In addition to human migration, material exchanges of goods, capital, books (and ideas) across borders have continuously shaped the country’s economy, politics, environment, and culture, a process that has become even more pronounced in later stages of global capitalism. The effects of this history of crossings, which is also a history of spoliation, dependencies, and global transformation, can be felt more than ever in contemporary artistic and cultural production, reverberating, more specifically, on a wealth of literary and critical works dedicated to rethinking the country through transnational lenses. Writers such as Adriana Lisboa, Tatiana Salem Levy, Ana Maria Gonçalves, to cite a few, have explored transnational narratives past and present, expanding the ways in which the national and local boundaries are charted and imagined. In the critical field, transnationalism has proven to be an exciting hermeneutical tool with which to approach issues of translation, diasporic thinking, environmental destruction, global interdependencies, and normative identities.
In this panel we explore the many facets of transnationalism in contemporary Brazilian literature and critical theory through such themes as disaster, displacement, dystopia, migration, political strife, race, and translation, posing questions such as: how does the intersection of the local and the global – the personal and the collective – expose contemporary processes of globalization? In what ways do the circumnavigations of characters and texts elicit new meanings for the works themselves? What kinds of solidarities and forms of belonging can be forged through transnational narratives, and how might this transnational imagination disrupt traditional configurations of World Literature?
