Reconfiguring Identities in the Portuguese-speaking World - Böcker

Cities of the Lusophone World addresses diverse literary and cultural representations of urban settings produced in the period from the 1960s to the present day and originating from the Island of Mozambique, Lisbon, Luanda, Macau, Maputo, Porto Alegre and São Paulo. The volume contributes to the interdisciplinary research field of urban cultural studies, which lies at the crossroads between the social sciences and the humanities. The essays gathered here consider the city not only as a geographical configuration, but also as a historical discourse where space and time merge and where different individual and collective practices and actions take place. They explore how memories and identities are framed, how people at the margins create discourses of resistance, and how processes of migration and urban transformation disrupt established social and cultural borders.

Mia Couto has been recognised internationally as one of the most important African authors of our times. His rapidly growing opus shifts fluidly between various modes of writing, mixing historical elements with poetic and autobiographic ones, in often unpredictable and intellectually challenging ways. With each new book, the writer multiplies various original wor(l)ds, creating new challenges for his readers. Each of Couto’s texts opens up a rhizomic world which in turn contains (an)other world(s), inviting us to review and adjust our earlier interpretations of his oeuvre as a whole.In The Worlds of Mia Couto a diverse group of literary experts sets out to explore Mia Couto’s oeuvre in relation not only to the imaginary worlds created by the author but also to the complex geographical, cultural and literary contexts that are woven into the texture of his work. While Couto has increasingly received scholarly attention, the international connections and connectivities of his work have been largely neglected so far. This book endeavours to show that Couto’s work can be read beyond its particular Mozambican and Lusophone context by paying attention to the broader African and global literary contexts, including Latin America, Asia and Europe. Mia Couto’s work is, for instance, of particular interest for rethinking, from the margins, established concepts of «World Literature», «globalisation» and the «postcolonial». The various chapters of The Worlds of Mia Couto focus thus on some of the – often unexpected – international connections across his fictional and non-fictional work beyond the Lusophone literary space, crossing cultural, linguistic and gender boundaries.

This is the first book to analyse the Mozambican modern ghost story, establishing the genre’s unique characteristics, situating it in a transnational context, and distinguishing it from other supernatural traditions. The study discusses why it emerged in different historical moments in Mozambican literature and how it was adapted in the process.Relying on a combination of short and close readings, this book offers a large scope spanning almost two centuries. It examines works of prominent and less prominent Mozambican authors – including Campos de Oliveira, Orlando Mendes, Mia Couto, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, and Paulina Chiziane – to discuss the relation of the Mozambican modern ghost story to colonial capitalism, the neoliberalism of the 1980s, and the globalization and world-literature debates of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries.

«This is a timely and rigorous addition to the cultural study of the Indian Ocean, as a nexus of transnational meaning and relations. Revealing the ocean in its historical, aesthetic and utopian diversity, this book heralds a new way of understanding shifting power dynamics fluidly defined through one of the globe’s most protean spaces.»(Phillip Rothwell, King John II Professor of Portuguese, University of Oxford)«The essays in this volume make a valuable contribution to the growing field of Indian Ocean Studies through their emphasis on literary and artistic production in multilingual and multicultural contexts. The resulting whole presents a stimulating new framework for transnational approaches to the study of works originating in the Lusotopic spaces of East Africa and Asia.»(Ellen W. Sapega, Full Professor, University of Wisconsin–Madison)Working from the premise that the Indian Ocean shapes new transnational imaginative geographies, this volume analyses how visual and written narratives from Lusophone, or rather «Lusotopic», spaces – Portugal, Mozambique, East Timor and Goa – point to productive critical dialogues with existing theories in Indian Ocean studies. The conceptual and epistemological revision presented in the book allows for the emergence of different theoretical constellations that are not solely based on the opposition between coloniality and the postcolonial condition, nor grounded upon the concept of linguistic or national identity, pointing to a set of original critical developments within the area of Indian Ocean studies.

«A pioneering first in the English language. This is a wonderfully subtle, multifaceted study of the image in the work of one of Portugal’s greatest writers. Admirable for its depth of analysis and breadth of coverage, this is a real gift for new learners of Portuguese and established scholars alike.»(Hilary Owen, University of Oxford)«The present collection of essays, produced by some of the best scholars who have dealt with Lídia Jorge’s work, should be of great help to English readers not familiar with the original language of a compelling, engaging writer deeply concerned with the world she lives in and the future of us all.»(Onésimo Teotónio Almeida, Brown University)As Aristotle has written, the image is at the core of the soul’s language. Indeed, given its significant potential and capacity for revelation – heightened in a society dominated by visual culture – the image would seem to be key to reflecting, critically and creatively, on humanity and on history itself. Lídia Jorge has asserted several times that her writing has always taken as its starting point a powerful and inspiring image, which concentrates the various meanings and reflections that she intends to explore while also dispersing these across her texts. Radiating from the initial image, Jorge manages to develop a gaze which is simultaneously critical, thorough and informative. Scholars point out that whenever language opens to universal images and mythologies capable of conveying visions of clarity, the subversive power of beauty is re-asserted. This power is confirmed and examined from different points of view and theories in this volume.

The filmography representing the ‘Portuguese Orient’ during the Estado Novo (1933–1974) is scarce and late, employing a simplified Luso- tropicalist rhetoric that repeatedly actualises the myth of a vast, long-lost, territory. This book examines the impact of cinematographic representations of the former Portuguese territories in the Orient on socio-cultural memories and narrative identities, through a critical exhumation of the archives and analysis of existing filmography. The analysis reveals that films of the ‘Portuguese Orient’ depict this imagined community with a certain degree of vagueness. This is largely a consequence of the prolonged disintegration of the metropolis’ relationship with this imagined community, a relationship that was mainly based on projections (about their alleged Portuguese identity) and ruins.

This monograph is the first to identify an important theoretical overlap between Anglo-Saxon and Lusophone postcolonial theories: the systematic neglect of gender and sexual variables in the analysis of the marketing of cultural difference in the post colonial era. Drawing on the theoretical work of Graham Huggan and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the author of this study discusses the political significance of this neglect by focusing on the asymmetrical positions occupied by two widely acclaimed Lusophone women writers, Paulina Chiziane of Mozambique and Lídia Jorge of Portugal. The book asks how these two contemporary writers deal with master narratives such as Lusofonia, exoticism, capitalism and post colonialism in their novels, and examines the implications of placing gender and sexual difference at the heart of the ‘post colonial exotic’.

This volume brings together interviews on the topic of the postcolonial nation and its narrations with prominent writers from Angola and Mozambique. The interviewees offer personal insights into the history of post-independence Angola and Mozambique and into the role of the intellectual elite in the complex processes of deconstructing colonial heritage and (re)constructing national identity in a multinational or multiethnic state. Their testimonies provide a parallel narrative that complements the many fictional narrators found in Angolan and Mozambican novels, short stories and poems. The authors interviewed in the book are Luandino Vieira, Ana Paula Tavares, Boaventura Cardoso, José Eduardo Agualusa, Ondjaki and Pepetela from Angola; and João Paulo Borges Coelho, Marcelo Panguana, Mia Couto, Paulina Chiziane, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa and Luís Carlos Patraquim from Mozambique.

The essays collected in this volume look at the way that Mozambican and Angolan literary works seek to narrate, re-create and make sense of the postcolonial nation. Some of the studies focus on individual works; others are comparative analyses of Angolan and Mozambican works, with a focus on the way they enter into dialogue with each other. The volume is oriented by three broad themes: the role of history; the recurring image of the voyage; and discursive/narrative strategies. The final section of the book considers the postcolonial in a broader Lusophone and international context.

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.

Although he committed suicide at the age of twenty-five, Mário de Sá-Carneiro left behind a rich corpus of texts that is inventive, playful, even daring. The first collection in English to be dedicated to his work, this volume brings together scholars from Portugal, Brazil, and the USA to reassess Sá-Carneiro’s contribution to Portuguese and European Modernism(s). In the book, established researchers and younger scholars delve into the complexities and paradoxes of his work, exploring not only the acclaimed novella Lucio’s Confession, but also his poetry, short fiction, and correspondence. Each essay engages in the necessary task of placing Sá-Carneiro’s work in a wider literary and artistic context, bringing back to his texts the creative energy of early twentieth-century Europe. Plural in their methods, the essays propose multiple lenses through which to tackle key aspects of Sá-Carneiro’s œuvre: his aesthetic and artistic influences and preoccupations; his negotiations/performances of identity; and the ways in which his work emerges in dialogue with other Modernist authors and how they in turn engage with his work. Though he is sometimes overshadowed by his more famous friend and artistic comrade, Fernando Pessoa, this collection shows just how much one misses, if one overlooks Sá-Carneiro and other writers of the Orpheu generation.

Published in 1972, New Portuguese Letters addressed censored issues – such as the colonial war, immigration, the Catholic Church, violence, and the legal and social status of women – becoming a symbol of resistance against the Fascist Portuguese regime. Privileging feminist approaches, this volume maps the reception of the book in Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, the UK, Ireland, the USA, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Scandinavia. The scandal that surrounded the banning of New Portuguese Letters, under the accusation of ‘pornographic content’, and the trial of the three authors for ‘outraging public morals’, brought the case to the attention of the international community. The book found instant support from feminist movements and well-known writers – such as Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Adrienne Rich and Anne Sexton – and was adopted as «the first international feminist cause».Given its great significance in political and aesthetic terms, New Portuguese Letters was – and remains – a fundamental work in contemporary literature and culture, offering an invaluable contribution to the history of women and raising crucial issues relevant for political agendas today, such as equality, justice and freedom.