Challenging notions of the Portuguese-speaking world as merely "backwards" or obscurantist during the eighteenth century, this issue explores how the circulation of Enlightenment-era discourses engendered creative appropriations, and unsettling compromises between divergent worldviews. The issue showcases the vibrant and diverse scholarship on the period in Portuguese and Brazilian literary and cultural studies, placing the Lusophone world in transatlantic and hemispheric contexts, while shedding light on several of its specific dimensions.