This book examines the evolution of contemporary narrative in Portuguese from the point of view of cultural labour. The main objective of this volume is to analyse the panorama of contemporary literary fiction in Portuguese under the prism of the economization of cultural creativity and the expansion of neoliberal understanding of creative subjectivity and self-realization. Assuming that neoliberalism still constitutes a haunting presence that becomes present in ways that are far from universal and homogeneous and that are shaped by coloniality, this book expands the debates on cultural labour and literary materialisms beyond European and North American contexts. Dealing with contemporary literary production from Brazil, Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde, Macau, Canada and Goa, the volume also tries to reimagine issues of cultural labour and the expansion of artistic modes of self-definition from the point of view of contemporary literary production in Portuguese.

Carlos Garrido Castellano is Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in University College Cork, Ireland, where he coordinates a BA programme on Portuguese Studies. He is also Senior Associate Researched at the Visual Identities in Art and Design (VIAD), University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He is Principal Investigator of the IRC Laureate Consolidator Project "Assessing the Contemporary Art Novel in Spanish and Portuguese: Cultural Labour, Personal Identification and the Materialisation of Alternative Art Worlds (ARTFICTIONS) and the author of Beyond Representation in Contemporary Caribbean Art  (2019), Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future  (2021) and Literary Fictions of the Contemporary Art System  (2023).