This work situates cultural labour (the productive, material and transformative dimension of cultural production) as a central concern of contemporary literary production in Portuguese. During the last decade, debates over the space that literatures in Portuguese occupy within world-literary paradigms have been the object of renewed attention, with major contributions making a case for a critical reconsideration of issues of positionality, cultural commodification and the power dynamics at play in the production, circulation and consumption of textual and literary texts written in Portuguese. Different in aims, scope and theoretical underpinnings, these voices share a sense of discomfort resulting from the marginal role that literature in Portuguese has historically played within a world-literary field that still privileges texts written in English and/or produced within Western European and North American contexts.