Toward a Multicultural Ethics and Decolonial Meta-Identity in the Work of Fernando Sylvan

This chapter seeks to flesh out Sylvan’s stance against Empire by interfacing his essayistic production with his poetry. For instance, in his O Racismo da Europa e a Paz no Mundo, written during the heightened period of anti-colonial struggle in Africa and Asia, Sylvan offers a theorization and cursory genealogy of European and European-American global hegemony, ranging from the European historicization of itself as ‘the standard civilization,’ the fantasy of European superiority, and its resignification of difference in order to retain the balance of global power. This chapter thus contextualizes Sylvan’s anti-imperial thought with that of postcolonial and decolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Enrique Dussel; in addition to elaborating the points where Sylvan’s thought further problematizes and contributes to the theorization of contemporary global power.

Transgendering Jesus: Mário Lúcio Sousa’s O Novíssimo Testamento and the Dismantling of Imperial Categories

This chapter examines how the novel combines the religious with elements of the fantastic in staging the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Placed within an existing field of global meanings, especially pertaining to notions of morality and propriety underpinned by racial and sexual discourses, Jesus confronts a world of stigma and suffering. As millions of people flock to Lém to seek out the messiah, many of which requesting miracles, Jesus comes face to face with imperial categorizations of bodies in terms of not only race and gender, but also of disease and disability. In doing so, she is forced to grapple with the construction and lived consequences of particular notions of normativity – of corporal ability, skin color, and gender – that inform privilege within Empire. The resolutions she seeks reveal a mission against what Michel Foucault and Gayatri Spivak call the epistemic violence of power, namely that of Empire.

Introduction

This introduction briefly discuss the theoretical debates into which I insert the current project, namely those within the realms of Decolonial and Postcolonial Studies with implications for interrelated branches of critical theory such as Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Deconstruction. In doing so, the introduction foregrounds the theoretical concerns raised by each text analysed, as well as the significance of these for study of Lusophone and postcolonial literatures, and beyond. By virtue of this reflection, the introduction also serves to lay out the theoretical groundwork that will inform the project.

Conclusion

The conclusion brings together the fundamental questions raised in each chapter and the interventions proposed by the texts analysed. In joining these, the book closes with a final concise reflection on possible trajectories against Empire.

Decolonizing Hybridity through Intersectionality and Diaspora in the Poetry of Olinda Beja

This chapter considers how Beja, born in 1946 in the African archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe, seeks to produce a signifying chain that emerges from the centuries-long impact of imperial power on the world, particularly on disenfranchised peoples and spaces. Beja, in this sense, takes a further step by reflecting on ways to enunciate identity and collective struggle in a decolonial fashion. The chapter reads select poems from three of her collections spanning her poetic trajectory and oeuvre: Bô Tendê? [Do You Understand?] (1992), No País do Tchiloli [In the Country of Tchiloli] (1996), and Aromas de Cajamanga [Aromas of Ambarella] (2009). In doing so, we shall examine what we may call a decolonial remapping; one that Beja carries out, I argue, in a poetic narrating/signifying of movement through time and space that re-orders imperial signifiers.

Spectrality as Decolonial Narrative Device for Colonial Experience in António Lobo Antunes’s O Esplendor de Portugal

This chapter explores how O Esplendor de Portugal by António Lobo Antunes deploys spectrality as a consistent and developed narrative device – an aesthetic mode of narrating colonial experience and subjectivities ensnared within imperial discourses. The novel’s narration is, for instance, constantly interrupted by voices from the past that participated in the colonist experience, incessantly interrupting the process of writing and the production of meaning. O Esplendor de Portugal demands that we engage with spectrality at both the level of writing and historicization – producing meaning in relation to particular events, as well as at the level of identity-formation. In this regard, the novel offers profound reflections as to the externality by which identity and subjectivity is formed within Empire. This leads the chapter toward a theoretical exploration of the relationship between specters and the Freudian/Lacanian specular image or ideal ego through which an individual becomes a subject within ideology. From here, the novel also guides this chapter toward yet another rethinking of Empire’s different layers of meaning and power.

Imperial Cryptonomy: Colonial Specters and Portuguese Exceptionalism in Isabela Figueiredo’s Caderno de Memórias Coloniais

In opposing mainstream metropolitan narratives of the imperial past, Figueiredo’s memoir retells many of her traumatic experiences growing up in the colony, beginning with her formation as a gendered and racialized subject and the teaching of desire by her social and familial circles of colonists. She, in other words, utilizes her own placement into Empire’s discursive field in order to contest the metropolis’s dominant post-imperial narrative regarding its colonial past. Of the different characters that emerge from her memoir, her father is undoubtedly the most prevalent. For instance, Figueiredo notably equates her father with colonialism, as the embodiment and voicing of race, gender, and class-based power. The ubiquity of the father in her narrating of the past urges us to think of him as a specter, one that repeatedly destabilizes the present, both hers and that of the former metropolis. This chapter thus utilizes Jacques Derrida’s concept of spectrality in dialogue with his engagement with Maria Torok and Nicholas Abraham’s notion of cryptonomy. The goal of this particular inquiry is to understand the ideological relationship between the field of racial, socio-economic and sexual meaning experienced by Figueiredo as a colonist and the official political narrative of Portuguese pluri-continentality and amicable colonialism promoted during and after the final three decades of Portuguese imperialism.

Untranslatable Subalternity and Historicizing Empire’s Enjoyment in Luís Cardoso’s Requiem para o Navegador Solitário

This chapter follows up on Sylvan’s expository indictment of Empire’s monologicism with an exploration of contemporary East Timorese writer Luís Cardoso’s contributions to decolonial tropes of movement and the making of meaning. Following a brief overview of Cardoso’s larger oeuvre, the chapter examines his 2007 novel, Requiem para o Navegador Solitário [Requiem for the Solitary Sailor], particularly the actions and experiences of its narrator, known only as Catarina. As a teenage girl, born in Batavia, Dutch East Indies, to a Chinese father and Batavian mother, her arranged marriage to a Portuguese port administrator of Dili leads her to move to the then colonial capital of Portuguese Timor. Taking place between the mid-1930s up to the Japanese invasion of the island of Timor during World War II in 1941, Catarina is ensnared by imperial actions both local and global.

Mário de Andrade’s Antropofagia and Macunaíma as Anti-Imperial Scene of Writing

This chapter examines Mário’s own deployment of the cannibal allegory his novel, Macunaíma (1928), and then by offering a rereading of the relationship between a particular chapter of the novel, titled ‘Carta pras Icamiabas’ [‘Letter to the Icamiabas’] and the novel as a whole. This particular part of the novel stands out from the rest for a variety of reasons. Firstly, its prose, utilizing a Renaissance European register of written Portuguese, is markedly different from the rest of the novel’s use of a strategically colloquial speech – one that supposedly reflected the everyday speech of Brazilian non-elites. Equally relevant is the fact that it is the only part of the novel narrated by Macunaíma. The letter comes after he reaches São Paulo following his journey from the Amazon to the industrialized mega-city, and is addressed to the all-woman tribe, Icamiabas, detailing what he finds in São Paulo.

Decolonizing Consumption and Postcoloniality: A Theory of Allegory in Oswald de Andrade’s Antropofagia

This chapter provides an exploration of the decolonial possibilities in works by the Brazilian Modernist movement of the early twentieth century – Antropofagia [Anthropophagy] – namely key works by its most acclaimed writers, Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade. The first chapter, ‘Decolonizing Consumption and Postcoloniality: a Theory of Allegory in Oswald de Andrade’s Antropofagia,’ interrogates what I argue to be a central aspect of the works and political project of the movement – the deployment of a particular mode of allegory, one of consumption. I explore this allegory of consumption beyond canonical readings of the movement’s cannibal metaphor in relation to Oswald de Andrade’s collection of poetry, Pau Brasil [Brazilwood], in addition to his seminal manifesto, ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ [‘Antropophagic Manifesto’] (1928).