Changing Lusospheres - Europe, Brazil, Africa. On old and new connections between centres and peripheries

The present volume is the result of a symposium held at the University of Luxembourg in November 2022. It brought together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars working on historical and contemporary connections between Portugal, Brazil, Luxembourg, and certain African countries. The objective of our joint project was to understand the movements and relationships in question as historico-politically and socio-culturally interconnected processes. The papers deal with specific migrations and diaspora experiences, as well as with the multiplicity and diversity of the relationships within the space that is created by these processes and that we tentatively describe as “changing lusospheres”.
The choice of location was related to the resolution to mark Luxembourg as part of a universe of migrations and encounters that is constituted by Portuguese and wider lusophone mobilities. Systematic research on these historically and culturally complex migration processes is still largely lacking, not least comparative interdisciplinary work on longstanding relationships and movements that connect Europe, Latin America, and Africa. With this edited volume, we aim to contribute to revealing this complexity by a broadening of perspective, more precisely, by a partial shift of focus to the “periphery”, which is represented by Luxembourg in a factual as well as in an emblematic sense.