Abstract
The main purpose of this thesis is to refocus academic attention on the Portuguese-American community of southeastern New England, one that has been developing and maintaining a cultural identity for the past two centuries, and that continues to make the study of Portuguese literature and language important in the region due to its direct social and political relevance. In this thesis, I ask what is at stake in continuing to explore and analyze the Portuguese-American diasporic culture of this region : not only through a developing canon of literary works, but also through various forms of conviviality that also serve to keep this community together as a distinct and identifiable cultural entity. Perhaps most notably, the Portuguese-American ethnic enclaves still found in New Bedford, Fall River and elsewhere in the South Coast region continue to find their own ways of maintaining and promoting elements of traditional culture in the expanded context of an innovative and ever-changing globalized and digital world. Moreover, as 20th-century theorists such as Roland Barthes and Michel de Certeau have pointed out, the production of culture also relies on transiting the less examined cultural elements of everyday life and bringing them into intellectual discussion. Through such theoretically informed interpretations, the point in the present moment of the here and now may be not only to examine and attempt a more in-depth, even phenomenological understanding of the recurrent features of Portuguese-American culture like food, music, religious life, and other traditions, but also how they contribute to the interconnected, globalized future of community identity, as recent examples from popular internet-based culture also demonstrate. While a growing corpus of literature about the Portuguese experience in America continues to develop these common points of reference, such as in the poetry and fiction of Frank X. Gaspar or the essays of local cultural critics, the future of the community could be affected by a potentially detrimental shift in many aspects of cultural life. Such changes, often due to various educational priorities shaped by a set of harsh economic realities, could come to threaten the very existence of Portuguese-American culture as we know it. Then again, there is another possibility : that the internet, with its globally connectedness to similar diasporic communities, their common use of the Portuguese language, and a parallel set of popular culture initiatives, expressed through video, music and online text, might even end up reversing this trend..