Francisco Bethencourt is Charles Boxer Professor of History at King's College London. He is the author of Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2013) and The Inquisition: A Global History, 1478-1834 (Cambridge, 2009). He co-edited Frontières religieuses à l'époque moderne (Paris, 2013), Racism and Ethnic Relations in the Portuguese-Speaking World (London, 2012), Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400-1800 (Cambridge, 2007), Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400-1700 (Cambridge, 2007), L'empire portugais face aux autres empires (Paris, 2007), and História da Expansão Portuguesa, 5 vols. (Lisbon, 1998-1999). He obtained his PhD at the European University Institute and his MA at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He was director of the National Library of Portugal and of the Gulbenkian Foundation Cultural Centre in Paris.

This book studies the uses and effects of utopian visions on history, literature and culture of the Portuguese-speaking countries; topics include national identity, political strategies, missionary doctrine and literary figures from Camões to José Saramago.

Contents: Francisco Bethencourt: The Power of Utopia - Helena Carvalhão Buescu: Utopia and History: Camões' Os Lusíadas and Tavares' Uma Viagem à Índia - Francisco Bethencourt: The Unstable Status of Sebastianism - Patrícia Vieira: António Vieira's Utopian Kingdom of Christ on Earth - Andrea Daher: Colonial Utopias: Between Indians and Missionaries - Lucia Nagib: Utopia in Brazilian Cinema: From Black God, White Devil to Foreign Land - Maria Manuel Lisboa: Elephants All the Way Down: Utopia and Dystopia in Hélia Correia's Insânia and José Saramago's As Intermitências da morte - Inocência Mata: From Utopia to Prophecy: The Meanderings of the Heterotopia of Nation in African Literatures - Maria Benedita Basto: Utopia in Angolan and Mozambican Literature: Material Futures, Dialectical Dances - José Neves: Utopia and Science in Portuguese Communism - Luís Trindade: The Utopian Unconscious: Literary Utopias and theRefashioning of Political Identities in 1920s Portugal - Diogo Duarte: Everyday forms of Utopia: Anarchism and Neo-Malthusianism in Portugal in the Early Twentieth Century - Nancy Priscilla Naro: From Canudos to Contestado: Disputed Utopias.

This book studies the history, literature and culture of Portuguese-speaking countries through the lens of utopia. The role of utopia in Portuguese literature is the object of fresh analyses ranging from Camões to Gonçalo M. Tavares, and António Vieira to José Saramago. The chapters on Angola and Mozambique show how national identity received a major boost through utopian literature - Pepetela is the anchor in the former case, while dance is used as a crucial metaphor to reveal the tension between the colonial and postcolonial gaze in the latter case. The visions of paradise in Tupi tradition and missionary doctrine inform the approach to Brazil, developed by the study of the utopian dimension of the revolts of Canudos and Contestado. Regional contrasts and the quest for Brazilian national identity underlie the chapter on the cinema of Glauber Rocha and Walter Salles. These political and cultural acts can be compared to the strange case of Sebastianism in Portugal, here studied across four centuries of adaptation and transformation. Anarchist, Communist and Catholic political projects are analysed in the context of the early twentieth century to complete this evaluation of the uses and effects of utopian visions in these countries.