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This article presents a historical analysis of discourses about language and literacy that have emerged during different periods in the political and cultural history of Portugal. It covers six periods, from the colonial era to the present, and it considers different geopolitical spaces, including the Portuguese mainland, the Atlantic archipelagos, former Portuguese colonies and diasporic spaces created as a result of emigration from Portugal. The article traces three kinds of discursive shift: (1) shifts in discourses in Portuguese society regarding the goals of language and literacy education, along with associated discourses about appropriate language and literacy pedagogies; (2) shifts in discourses about the specific nature and significance of literacy in Portuguese; and (3) shifts in discourses about the value and symbolic power of standardized forms of spoken and written Portuguese. It shows how each historical period has been characterized by distinctive political and ideological currents which have, in turn, shaped and re-shaped ways of thinking about the role of language and literacy education in the definition of citizenship and national identity, in the construction of heritage, in the creation of a "modern" democratic state and, more recently, in the retooling of human resources to create a flexible labour force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on data generated in collaborative biographical story-telling groups with migrant women in rounds of stories, this article deals with the dynamics of power and knowledge displayed by migrant speakers in a situation of diaspora. I focus on a sexual harassment episode shared by one female Brazilian migrant speaker, Flavia, in relating a crucial moment of change in her life history. The study was structured to gain a perspective on this biographical rupture from three angles, namely successive rounds of stories, the story-telling interaction, as well as the circulation of knowledge displayed by speakers and textual objects they produced across situated interactions. The various perspectives bring to light a language biographical juncture, or muda, i.e. a meaningful, internalized, enduring and embodied re-socialisation into a new linguistic environment. An analysis of the moment by moment subjectivation process revealed this participant subalternally positioned as a woman, a Brazilian migrant and a speaker, hence, as a new citizen in Portugal framed by a set of different varieties of Portuguese permeated by (gendered) coloniality. I illustrate how a combined focus on the socio-material dispositions, on the production of discursive selves and on intersubjectivity in the rounds of stories helped to disclose the material and discursive workings of power and knowledge. Participants biographized themselves as migrants and speakers, with embodied, emotional and enduring biopolitical implications. Finally, the article discusses the extent to which the dispositions and affordances of biographical research, as acts of biographization, contribute to capturing the biopolitical nature of a language muda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the pertinence of language and discourse studies. It further discusses Bolivian sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui opinion on internal and external colonialism; English language and sociolinguistics; and acts of knowledge affected by hegemonic positionings related to language, coloniality, racism, sexism, among others. Also mentions about Cusicanqui's proposal of modern indigenous hegemony mediated by Quechuaand Aymara, counter colonial hegemony.

Written in collaboration - four hands and three disciplinary gazes - and revisiting "Literatura e emigração: poetas emigrantes nos estados de Massachusetts e Rhode Island" (Capinha, 1993), this article illustrates how a literature of/in e/immigration contributes to understand acts of identification and meaning-making in contemporary societies permeated by mobilities. Writing poetry - and poetic writing - allows us the possibility to study spaces of speaking, writing and biographizing that unveil the essentially political nature of lived migrant experience, both singular and collective, subject to juxtaposed, ever changing, ever more unequal and violent social structures. In this text, complexified by the impact of recent migration in the imagination of centres and peripheries within the modern Portuguese State, we stand against static views of language as monoglossic systems that manipulate and control, and call for political attention to languaging in action (poien), as radically local language doings in movement and situated in history. 'Telling oneself again' forges spaces of breathing, where poets/writers/speakers reinvent themselves in-between places and new metaphors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]