The United Kingdom and Portugal share a past of territorial expansion in multilingual Africa, a continent with great cultural and linguistic variety. The linguistic and educational policies implemented during colonization and decolonization prevail because of the economic and financial interdependence generated by the present global order. The Commonwealth and the CPLP are also, partly, responsible for sustaining distinctive relationships with former African colonies, which have led to the promotion of language as a form of soft power. This is a comparative study analyzing the Anglo- and Portuguese cultural and linguistic spheres in Africa. Conclusions reveal an undesirable gap between official policies and linguistic realities, which can only be understood through paradox, the best-defining characteristic of English and Portuguese linguistic legacies in Africa.

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The "human interest story as social parable" (Kerrane 1997: 17) is the cornerstone of Isabel Nery's book The Prisoners, Mothers behind bars (2012). It pays respect to ordinary people with extraordinary lives, a relevant feature of literary journalism (Sims 1995: 3). For months, Nery sat, observed, listened and talked to the jailed mothers in two prisons in Portugal, Tires and Santa Cruz do Bispo, and in Rhode Island in the USA. The author tells their stories and gives voice to their thoughts and feelings in an attempt to uncover and recover the dignity of human life. Immersion reporting and a critical standpoint result in an impactful testimony of the harsh reality of imprisoned motherhood and childhood and the experience of constrained freedom where the absence of sun, joy and care are deeply felt. Nery is a literary journalist who reveals the emotional state of feminine human nature behind bars where survival, (re)adaptation and guilt go hand in hand with despair from lack of fellow human concern.

Abstract:José Saramago"s works depict an unfinished and dormant modernity and contribute to a better understanding of the contemporary world, through a local spatiality which soon becomes a social discourse. As stated by the Swedish Academy, Saramago creates "parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony [that] continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality". The universal theme of social identity does not suppress the historical reference, though it emphasizes the consequences of modernity as a decisive factor for the transformation of the global identity. The questioning of the paradigms of social evolution is associated with the absence of human justice, as well as the exploitation and domination of the modern subject through the decrease of freedom, the psychological imprisonment and ideological alienation.Keywords: José Saramago, social identity, social awareness, Nobel Prize, modernity, literature "talvez o romance possa restituir-nos essa vertigem suprema, o alto e extático canto de uma humanidade que ainda não foi capaz, até hoje, de conciliar-se com a sua própria face." (Saramago 1994: 212-213) "maybe the novel can restore that ultimate vertigo, the high and mighty chant of a humanity who has not yet come to terms with its own image" It is thought that in literature the social theme "is never merely a surface layer […] it is the matrix within which all other terms are fleshed and shaped" (Eagleton 1988: 2) and that it is at the level of the values that literature "is seen to reinforce and illuminate purely sociological material […] it delineates man"s anxieties, hopes and aspirations, is perhaps one of the most effective sociological barometers of the human response to social forces" (Swingewood 1972: 15-17). The literary text thus emerges as social matter with the capacity to question Man and raise his awareness. José Saramago"s works portray an unfinished modernity and contribute to a better understanding of the modern world, through a spatiality which is initially local but which spreads rapidly to social discourse. The literary space works as a frame promoting a dialogue that questions the psychological, physical, moral, social, political and historical reality. The universality of this theme does not annul the historical reference, though it does highlight the consequences of modernity as a decisive factor in the transformation of the global identity. The capitalist fever under the form of excess consumption, the decentralization of the basic concepts of human reference previously established by traditional order, the media"s trivialization of war and death and the fragmentation of time and space, are some of the factors that have socially united the individual citizens of the so-called globalized world or that have led to an attempt at homogenization. Claudio Guillén states that it was from that "tensão entre a integridade do mundo descrito pelas ciências naturais, ou abarcado pelas tecnologias, e a pluralidade de mundos -sociais, políticos, culturais, psíquicos ...