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Decanting the Past: Africa, Colonialism, and the New Portuguese Novel
Abstract
Se os anos setenta e oitenta são fecundos em memórias e ficções da Guerra Colonial, a partir da década de noventa atesta-se uma tendência da ficção portuguesa de temática africana de apropriar-se da figura e da experiência multigeracionai do colono para, assim, analisar o passado do Portugal colonial e a ruÃna do último império. Neste ensaio lêem-se romances de quatro escritores portugueses consagrados, Maria Isabel Barreno, Miguel Sousa Tavares, António Lobo Antunes e Eduardo Bettencourt Pinto. Procura-se reflectir sobre a contribuição do romance de revisitação africana e, em particular, sobre as imagens da famÃlia portuguesa além-mar, das entidades colonizadoras e do retornado. Através destas quatro vozes do romance actual, examina-se, por um lado, a emergência de novas e renovadas perspectivas acerca do projecto colonial português em Ãfrica e, por outro lado, a criação de um espaço de decantação através do qual se indaga criticamente sobre a identidade nacional portuguesa no contexto do colonialismo e do pós-colonialismo.
... O fenómeno editorial associado às memórias coloniais foi assinalado por Raquel Ribeiro no jornal Público ("Os retornados estão a abrir o baú", edição de 12 / 08 / 2010). Sobre o romance dito "sério" de revisitação africana ver Gould (2008). Para a história da ocupação portuguesa do Sul de Angola são ainda indispensáveis as obras de William Gervase Clarence-Smith (1979) e de René Pélissier (1997). ...
This text explores the connected reproduction stories of Portuguese settlers and karakul sheep in Southwest Angola. It follows the karakul trail from South West Africa (SWA) under German occupation into the desert of Moçâmedes, making use of mimesis as a concept to understand colonial practices in the Third Portuguese Empire. The Karakul Experiment Station (Posto Experimental do Caracul) founded in 1948 is taken as a site for testing such practices through its combination of experiments on sheep artificial insemination as well as on colonial sociabilities. The layout of the Station, with laboratories side by side with an “indigenous village” that replicated a Kuvale onganda, was the first materialization of the new colonial society to emerge out of karakul production. The appropriation by Gilberto Freyre of karakul as embodiment of luso-tropicalism makes these sheep good things to think with in inquires on the nature of Portuguese colonialism.
Having built much of their wealth, power, and identities on imperial expansion, how did the Portuguese and, by extension, Europeans deal with the end of empire? Postcolonial People explores the processes and consequences of decolonization through the histories of over half a million Portuguese settlers who 'returned' following the 1974 Carnation Revolution from Angola, Mozambique, and other parts of Portugal's crumbling empire to their country of origin and citizenship, itself undergoing significant upheaval. Looking comprehensively at the returnees' history and memory for the first time, this book contributes to debates about colonial racism and its afterlives. It studies migration, 'refugeeness,' and integration to expose an apparent paradox: The end of empire and the return migrations it triggered belong to a global history of the twentieth century and are shaped by transnational dynamics. However, they have done nothing to dethrone the primacy of the nation-state. If anything, they have reinforced it.
This essay examines two Portuguese novels about colonialism and its legacies: António Lobo Antunes’s Fado Alexandrino (1983) and Aida Gomes’s Os Pretos de Pousaflores ( The Blacks from Pousaflores) (2011). Fado Alexandrino perpetuates the use of Black women’s raped bodies as a plot device to represent colonial violence, while Gomes’s narrative empowers racialized victims of sexual abuse and challenges dominant public memories of the Colonial War. A close reading of these novels, contextualized against the background of scholarly debates about the representation of sexual violence, exposes both the perils and potential of cultural works to preserve the memory of rape in armed conflict.
Decolonization resulted in more than half a million Portuguese settlers giving up their life in Africa. Most of them headed to Portugal, where they were called retornados (returnees). As living reminders of an illegitimate history, they do not fit into the dominant post-imperial historical narratives in Portugal and have until recently been invisible within the public arena. This article explores the memorial vacuum left by the collapse of the Portuguese empire and the return, while also addressing the present-day resurgence of retornados’ memories in Portuguese society. For these purposes, the article is based on the concept of non-memory, a concept which relates to gaps in the social memory that arise from the concealment of certain problematic historical events regarded as illegitimate or shameful for the myths and ideologies of national consciousness. Although it focuses on the Portuguese case, this article is placed in the wider context of the memorial place of the end of the empire in postcolonial Europe.
This essay sets out to analyze the vectors of continuity and reconfiguration of the Portuguese empire in the narratives of the Portuguese language in its two hegemonic spaces, and within a new sphere, that of the Arts. It will explore the language narratives as they materialized in the Museu da Língua Portuguesa in São Paulo, and in the convoluted trajectory of its homologous museum's projects in Lisbon. The main focus of this comparative analysis is how Africa-the one that belongs to the contemporary Portuguese and Brazilian imaginaries-has been represented in these museums. The object of analysis is therefore the imagination of Africa in Brazil and Portugal.
This book brings forth a new contribution to the study of imperialism and colonial discourse by theorizing the emergence and function of individual identity as product and producer of imperial power. While recent decades of theoretical reflections on imperialism have yielded important understandings of how the West has repeatedly reconsolidated its power, this book seeks to grasp the complex role of subjectivity in reformulating the terms of imperial domination from early modern European expansion to late capitalism. This entails approaching Empire as a constantly shifting system of differences and meanings as well as an ontological project, a mode of historical writing, and economy of desire that repeatedly envelops the subject into the realm of western power. The analysis of an array of literary texts and cultural artifacts is undertaken by means of a theoretically eclectic approach drawing on psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, postcolonial theory, and Marxism with the aim of forwarding current knowledge of Empire while also contributing to different branches of critical theory. In exploring the formation of imperial subjectivity in different historical moments, Silva raises new questions related to the signification of otherness in European expansion and colonial settlement, slavery and eugenics in post-independence Americas, and late capitalist circulation of bodies and commodities. The volume also covers a broad range of geo-cultural spaces in order to locate western power in time and space. This books diversity in terms of approach, historical scope, and cultural contexts makes it a useful tool for research and teaching among students and scholars of disciplines including Postcolonial Studies, Colonial History, Literature, and Globalization.
Resumo
Neste artigo analisam-se os processos narrativos que dão conta da formação da memória, em articulação com o cronótopo do hotel, na obra O retorno, de Dulce Maria Cardoso. Discute-se, através da figura da repetição e dos seus desdobramentos retóricos, a negociação e o conflito entre vários discursos, espaços e tempos expostos no relato do protagonista Rui, que constata a impossibilidade de retornar, simultaneamente, ao passado e a Portugal, através do questionamento dos limites da linguagem. Procura-se ainda demonstrar como o paradoxo de voltar a um lugar/tempo que já não existe é amplificado na estadia no hotel, o microcosmos que dá corpo à experiência da espera e do trânsito dos retornados entre a partida das ex-colónias e o início de uma nova vida na metrópole. ***************************************************** The hotel chronotope and the formation of memory in O retorno by Dulce Maria Cardoso This article focuses on the narrative features addressing the formation of memory, in relation to the hotel chronotope, in O retorno, by Dulce Maria Cardoso. Through the analysis of repetition and its rhetoric variations, it examines the negotiation and the conflict underlying the several textual, spatial and temporal issues exposed in the account of its protagonist Rui, who realizes the impossibility of returning to the past and, at the same time, to Portugal, by questioning the limits of language and discourses. It aims to demonstrate how the paradox of returning to a place /time that no longer exists is amplified in the stay at the hotel, the microcosm shaping the experience of waiting and of being in transit went through by the retornados, while leaving the ex-colonies and starting a new life at the metrópole. Keywords: Memory; Postcolonial literature; Retornados; Chronotope; Hotel
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