Imaginary Geographies in Portuguese and Lusophone- African Literature

Description

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 Portugals 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 Europes 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 Portugals arrival in Asia undercuts this account. The narratives about Portugals 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 Antnio Lobo Antunes eschews this trend, insisting instead upon the incommensurability between the liberation struggles and Portugals 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.