Moutinho, Isabel: Images of Africa in contemporary narrative in Portuguese (original) (raw)
Related papers
Os retornados" with Antunes: Luanda, Angola and Lisbon
2016
António Lobo Antunes explores a forced encounter of a Portuguese diaspora with Africa for some settlers. He examines the nature of the bi-directional diaspora for “os retornados”, who, having returned to Portugal after independence of the colonies, found they were invisible in the eyes of Portugal, as portrayed in ‘O esplendor de Portugal’ and in ‘A história do hidroavião’. Luanda, Angola and Lisbon are depicted as spaces where each individual represents the reverse of the Portuguese colonial past. Antunes turns to historical facts as a source for a critical fiction. The prominence given to the experience of Africa and Portugal makes these books a valuable sociological document, illustrating that there was not much room left for any of these voices, neither in Angola, nor in Lisbon. Portuguese Language remains as their only space, which allows António Lobo Antunes the claim of a cultural dimension of these “retornados”.
Imaginary Geographies in Portuguese and Lusophone-African Literature (2007)
This study interrogates a series of utopian projections that have informed Portuguese and Luso-African letters and culture since the Renaissance. Concentrating on the three crucial historical moments – Portugal’s tenuous hegemony in the Asian seas in the sixteenth century, the collapse of its colonial empire in the mid-1970s, and the post-independence period of re-evaluating nationalisms in Africa – the study examines the familiar “long narrative” which casts the Portuguese Discoveries as an inaugural and enabling event in Europe’s conquest of the world. In the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century texts, a sense of belatedness and danger in the face of a vast commercial network which preceded by several centuries Portugal’s arrival in Asia undercuts this account. The narratives about Portugal’s colonial wars in Africa negate the Salazarist project to restore the mythologized age of discoveries and seek simultaneously to converge with anti-colonial guerrilla movements. The work of António Lobo Antunes eschews this trend, insisting instead upon the incommensurability between the liberation struggles and Portugal’s April Revolution. Concomitantly, recent Lusophone African literature pictures the struggle of liberation as a cancellation of historicity, and underscores the “differend” between official constructions of nationhood and the future imagined from below. Reviews “This boldly designed and splendidly executed inquiry into discourses of colonial and postcolonial experience in the Portuguese-speaking world merits a readership as wide and varied as is the scope of its author’s interests and expertise. Dr. Madureira moves with ease and elegance over the vast territory of Portuguese, Brazilian and Lusophone-African literatures, historiography and criticism from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first ... This is comparative literature at its best – and one can only hope that readers from outside the usual-suspects circle of academics specializing in Luso-Afro-Brazilian studies will recognize it as well.” – Professor Anna Klobucka, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth “Madureira’s Imaginary Geographies manages, in all its referential complexity, and against all odds, to interweave a series of diverse theoretical perspectives from a number of cultural traditions to make a critical rethinking of an interconnected world in continual, ongoing semantic transition possible—especially given that this world, whether in Portuguese or any number of other languages, continues both “narratives of discovery and empire” and, just as importantly, narratives of resistance and alternative cultural agency.” – Prof. Christopher Larkosh, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for Ellipsis: Journal of the American Portuguese Studies Association
Comunicação e Sociedade
A 15 de março de 2021 completaram-se 60 anos da insurgência angolana que deu início à Guerra Colonial. A data reavivou a memória de um marco interseccional entre as histórias de Portugal e Angola e, por ter ganhado espaço nos média informativos mainstream, fez-se oportuna para que se analisassem as narrativas mediáticas que recontaram o conflito. O episódio, que se deu em 1961, foi motivado por uma série de fatores, dos quais se destaca a insatisfação dos povos nativos com o regime de exploração. Nesta investigação, inscrita no campo da narratologia pós-colonial, pretendeu-se compreender de que forma os jornais portugueses e angolanos reportaram esta efeméride. Para tal, recorreu-se a uma metodologia de natureza qualitativa — a análise crítica do discurso — e analisaram-se, de modo exploratório, textos jornalísticos sobre a efeméride em questão publicados nos diários Público e Jornal de Angola. O objetivo era compreender as diferenças ideológicas entre a abordagem de cada uma das pr...
Convergência Lusíada, n. 41, 2019
The close-reading proposed, based on the interartistic comparison methodology that makes literary texts dialogue with artistic ones, offers a reinterpretation of the notion of frontier, a very important one for Angolan literature of the Fifties to the Seventies, using some Antonio Ole’s works as starting point. His artistic production, punctuated, among many other themes he deals with, by a reflection on urban space that has continued since the period of independence in Angola, is compared here with some short stories by Luandino Vieira in which “a nossa cidade de Luanda” — as their various narrators like to say — plays a primary role.
History and Anthropology, 2022
How do soldiers recall and voice their wartime experiences when the war they fought is under scrutiny? How do they inscribe the recollection of private affairs in a potentially contested colonial past? Drawing from an ethnography of war memory and focusing on an artillery unit’s deployment in the Portuguese colonial war in Angola, in 1971, this article tackles both the soldiers’ memories and the military reports about the unit’s length of service. It articulates and contrasts the formulaic order of the official account with the veterans’ affective storytelling, to unearth the cracks that run beneath the reconfiguration of colonial war violence in Angola. Soldiers’ narratives, it will be argued, avoid the wars’ dystopic potential by dislocating attention to the affective reverberation of the past and by silencing accounts of bloodshed. And yet, they are unable to fully de-politicize their wartime stories, as soldiers unwittingly disclose episodes of sexual violence against African women, hence exposing the enduring entanglements of sexuality, race and colonialism.
António Lobo Antunes explores a forced encounter of a Portuguese diaspora with Africa for some settlers. He examines the nature of the bi-directional diaspora for “os retornados”, who, having returned to Portugal after independence of the colonies, found they were invisible in the eyes of Portugal, as portrayed in ‘O esplendor de Portugal’ and in ‘A história do hidroavião’. Luanda, Angola and Lisbon are depicted as spaces where each individual represents the reverse of the Portuguese colonial past. Antunes turns to historical facts as a source for a critical fiction. The prominence given to the experience of Africa and Portugal makes these books a valuable sociological document, illustrating that there was not much room left for any of these voices, neither in Angola, nor in Lisbon. Portuguese Language remains as their only space, which allows António Lobo Antunes the claim of a cultural dimension of these “retornados”.
This article analyses two postcolonial short stories from Goa: the Anglophone "A Portuguese Soldier's Story" by Lambert Mascarenhas and the Lusophone "Um Português em Baga" by Epitácio Pais. Both narratives feature a Portuguese subject who returns to the territory after the demise of colonial rule to resolve unfinished business dating from colonial times. Adapting the ideas of Homi Bhabha and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, I look at how each story challenges essentialist ideas about the ex-coloniser in order to move past dichotomising anti-colonial discourses and, in so doing, allow the reader to question common presuppositions about the orientation and operations of postcolonial literature. Written in different languages and at different times, the two prose tales also differ in their conclusions and so reveal the complexity of identity games in postcolonial situations, an intricacy underplayed by a narrowly anti-colonial conception of postcoloniality.
Wounds and History: Postcolonial Trauma in José Eduardo Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons
Is This a Culture of Trauma? An Interdisciplinary Perspective, 2013
The principal aim of this chapter is to trace the presence of the post-colonial trauma of Angolan history in the overwhelming novel of José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons. After the long years of a brutal colonial war against the Portuguese in the 1960s, by arriving at the moment of the collapse of the Portuguese Colonial Empire and the independence of the country, Angola had toface a harsh and bloody civil war between 1975 and 2003. Until a certain point the book remains silent about this brutality of the national history, but the trauma enters the text unexpectedly. The novel articulates the uncanny experience that one cannot escape from the trauma, and as Ana Mafalda Leite points out, war inevitably becomes the central theme of contemporary literature in Angola. The strange and exotic novel of José Eduardo Agualua is narrated by a gecko. The narration of the gecko oscillates between dreams, reality, past, and present creating a floating and essentially magical world which tries to exclude the post-colonial trauma of the national history. This magical world collapses when the trauma enters the text. One of the female protagonists, Ángela Lucía literally carries the wounds of history on her body, the scars of the civil war - needless to say how strongly trauma is related, not just etymologically, but also metaphorically, to the wound. Through the scars, the past, the tragedy of national history, is present on the female body of the post-colonial subject. In this chapter I intend to explore how the individual trauma of the subject presented directly through the scars, is related to the national history of post-colonial Angola, and how the wounds of the body carry the wounds of history. Agualusa - the par excellence lusophone post-colonial writer - inscribes the trauma in a fantastic and oneiric horizon, emphasising that under the layers of the posterior created artificial memories (invented by the protagonist Félix Ventura), hides the sinister reality of history, and despite the exotic and magical atmosphere, no one can escape from the trauma of the past.