Reconfiguring Identities in the Portuguese-speaking World – serie

This is the first book to provide a comparative exploration of the gendered and sexual body in Mozambican literature, engaging with the work of six authors spanning different generations, styles and aesthetics. The study begins by providing a detailed and innovative survey of the dynamics of gender, sexuality and power in the Portuguese colonial and Mozambican post-independence contexts, from the nineteenth century to the turn of the millennium. This initial investigation provides the sociohistorical backdrop for in-depth analyses of representations, uses and subversions of the body in poetry and prose fiction by José Craveirinha, Noémia de Sousa, Lília Momplé, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, Paulina Chiziane and Suleiman Cassamo. Using a wide and interdisciplinary range of theoretical frameworks, the book offers a fresh and creative new perspective on Mozambican history, political life and literary output.

The fortieth anniversary of the independence of the African countries colonized by Portugal presents a valuable opportunity to reassess how colonialism has been 'imagined' through the medium of the moving image. This volume investigates Portuguese colonialism and its filmic and audio-visual imaginaries both during and after the Estado Novo regime.

How can we read twenty-first-century African literatures in Portuguese so that we can properly understand the voices telling us of their particular situation today? In The Late Postcolonial Condition Emanuelle Rodrigues dos Santos deftly shows us how to adjust our perspectives and assumptions from those of the past into the dynamics of the very different conditions of the present. This book will be essential reading for all students and scholars of contemporary African fiction in Portuguese.

(Robert J. C. Young, Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature, New York University)

In The Late Postcolonial Condition, Emanuelle Rodrigues dos Santos counters the perception of the backlash against postcolonial studies by proposing a reconfiguration of its paradigms for studying the African literatures of Portuguese-speaking countries. In doing so, she explores the interpretative perspectives of the longue durée of the past to understand the different levels of coloniality in the studies of the literatures of the Global South, with an emphasis on a main theme in African literatures in the twenty-first century: the role of the nation-state in the contemporary juncture of each postcolonial context. This book is an important contribution to contemporary literary studies, especially to the literatures of Portuguese-speaking Africa that are still peripheral to hegemonic anglophone scholarship. It brings valuable insights into postcolonial studies and debates around identity and narration of the nation in African literatures through the conceptualisation of late postcoloniality.

(Inocência Mata, Professor in the Department of Romance Literatures, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon)

This book provides a unique portrait of the late postcolonial condition in the twenty-first century, shedding new light on complex national and transnational dynamics in the development of postcolonial states in the aftermath of independence. This analysis of fictional narratives from Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, and São Tomé and Príncipe establishes a much-needed critical reassessment of the theoretical framework of postcolonial studies used to trace the development of key tropes within these national literary systems, including nation building, the role of violence and economic exploitation in the postcolonial age. Engaging with a selection of works published at the turn of the millennium by authors such as José Eduardo Agualusa, João Paulo Borges Coelho, Evel Rocha, Filomena Embaló and Albertino Bragança, this study considers the impact of relevant aesthetic, cultural, political and economic circumstances to propose the concept of late postcolonial condition to define their contemporary postcolonial experience.

This volume investigates literary and cinematographic narratives from Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Sao Tome and Principe, analysing the different ways in which social and cultural experience is represented in postcolonial contexts. It continues and completes the exploration of the postcolonial imaginary and identity of Portuguese-speaking Africa presented in the earlier volume Narrating the Postcolonial Nation: Mapping Angola and Mozambique (2014).

Memory, history, migration and diaspora are core notions in the recreation and reconceptualization of the nation and its identities in Capeverdian, Guinean and Saotomean literary and cinematographic culture. Acknowledging that the idea of the postcolonial nation intersects with other social, political, cultural and historical categories, this book scrutinizes written and visual representations of the nation from a wide range of inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives, including literary and film studies, gender studies, sociology, and post-colonial and cultural studies. It makes a valuable contribution to current debates on postcolonialism, nation and identity in these former Portuguese colonies.

This collection of interviews with writers and filmmakers from Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Sao Tome and Principe explores representations and images of national identity in the postcolonial narratives of these countries. The volume makes a valuable contribution to debates on postcolonialism, nation and identity in Portuguese-speaking Africa.

José Saramago, one of the most critically acclaimed writers worldwide, was distinguished with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998. This honour, the first to be bestowed on a Portuguese-language writer, marked one of the high points in a long and manifold career. Largely an auto-didact, Saramago never let fame obscure his clear vision of the world, tempered by a lifelong acquaintance with severe inequality, political struggle, but also success, be it in terms of the 1974 revolution that freed Portugal from nearly fifty years of dictatorship, be it in the growing acclaim he received since deciding to focus on writing. The Nobel Prize provided Saramago with a wider, perhaps more effective, base for expressing his opinions; but it did not bring about a rupture, either with his political convictions, or with his writing. In the large bibliography on Saramago sustained critical studies in English are still relatively scarce. This volume, composed by many diverse voices, and the first to focus on Saramago’s late works, strives to address that gap. As 2022 marks Saramago’s centenary, this volume is dedicated especially to his enduring memory and to all the futures his works made possible to envision.