Reescrita de si pelo outro: identidade portuguesa e paródia em Deus-dará, de Alexandra Lucas Coelho / Rewriting oneself through the other: Portuguese identity and parody in Deus-dará, by Alexandra Lucas Coelho

Resumo: O artigo aponta o modo como o romance Deus-dará de Alexandra Lucas Coelho, escritora portuguesa contemporânea, pode ser compreendido como um exercício de renegociação da identidade portuguesa em relação a questões referentes à colonização no Brasil. Mais do que isso, problematiza-se como, por meio da estratégia da paródia no texto ficcional, a autora consegue expressar uma necessidade e possibilidade de se redefinir pelo outro em um movimento contrário ao do discurso colonial – o que também ocorre em suas entrevistas e em suas narrativas de viagens, tais como em Vai, Brasil e Cinco Voltas na Bahia e um beijo para Caetano Veloso. Palavras-chave: identidade portuguesa; paródia; pós-modernismo; escrita portuguesa contemporânea; Alexandra Lucas Coelho. Abstract: The article observes how the novel Deus-dará, by Alexandra Lucas Coelho, a Portuguese contemporary writer consists in an exercise of renegotiation for the Portuguese identity in relation to issues that refer to the colonization process in Brazil. Moreover, this text seeks to show how parody as a fictional literary strategy helps the author in expressing a necessity and a possibility of redefining oneself through the other, in a direction that goes in the opposite way of the colonial speech. This necessity and this possibility also appear in the author’s interviews and travel books, such as Vai, Brasil and Cinco Voltas na Bahia e um beijo para Caetano Veloso, which will also be mentioned in this article.Keywords: Portuguese identity; parody; post-modernism; Portuguese contemporary writing; Alexandra Lucas Coelho.

Disenchanting Socialist Internationalism: Polish Workers in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, 1962−91

This article seeks to paint a more nuanced picture of the role plaid by socialist internationalism in East Germany and Czechoslovakia regarding the employment of foreign labour, focusing on Poles. The long-term cooperation with Warsaw provides a suitable perspective on how to interpret particular periods and milestones of the schemes as a whole. The article partly dissociates from contemporary writing on the subject, which perceives socialist internationalism either as an instrument of propaganda, masking ruthless exploitation, or as a genuine value that inspired and permeated foreign labour recruitment. Based on documents from archives of all three countries in focus, it is argued that the schemes were clearly driven by the economic needs from the very beginning. Except for limited-scale cooperation with countries of the Global South, socialist internationalism came largely to the fore during the 1970s as a substitutional objective, when the economic goals of the foreign labour recruitment proved unreachable, and policymakers were at pains to reshape the meaning of the schemes (running already in full gear). However, with growing and unmanageable economic difficulties, the idealist rhetoric of internationalism plaid an ever more important role in framing the labour force cooperation until the end of communist regimes.

“Indisputably Available”

Spurred on by Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys (2019), which is set in Tallahassee, FL, during the 1950s and 1960s, this essay presents a close-up look at James Baldwin’s visit to Tallahassee in May 1960. Moving between Baldwin’s writings about the South, especially “They Can’t Turn Back,” published by Mademoiselle magazine in August 1960, and subsequent writing about the movement in Tallahassee, and checking off against Whitehead’s fictional treatment, we find a lattice of silences obscuring the names and contributions of Black women. Most importantly, we find that the historic case of the rape of Betty Jean Owens in May 1959, and the subsequent trial that summer, appears neither in Baldwin’s nor Whitehead’s writing about Tallahassee at the time. This essay establishes the missing names of Black women in the places marked and unmarked by Baldwin in his work at the time, and puts the case of Betty Jean Owens on the historical map where it belongs. In so doing, we figure issues of race, gender, sex, and violence for the ways they twist together, ways suppressed in historical (and even some contemporary) writing, ways crucial to our deepening consideration of Baldwin’s work and the history which he drew upon and to which he contributed so profoundly.

Visual culture

This chapter addresses books published in the field of visual culture in 2020, and is divided into three sections: 1. Curatorial Practice; 2. Thinking About Space; and 3. The New Craft. The books under review cover a range of subjects within their specialities but reflect general trends in contemporary writing and study in the field of visual culture. The first section looks at publications that examine curatorial practice (In the Meantime: Speculations on Art, Curation, and Exhibitions, by Jens Hoffman; Museums Inside Out: Artist Collaborations and New Exhibition Ecologies by Mark W. Rectanus); the second section examines books that describe theories of space (Architecture and Ekphrasis: Space, Time and the Embodied Description of the Past by Dana Arnold; Construction Site for Possible Worlds, edited by Amanda Beech and Robin Mackay); and the third and final section examines publications about craft and its ethics (The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design, edited by Anthea Black and Nicole Burisch).

CONTEMPORARY CREATIVE FICTION WRITING SOCIAL AND HOMELAND ISSUES

The narrative story has evolved from its precursor, when the old myths are shattered, in which the new novel has become a text with numerous cultural formats within its contents. Fragmentation and separation have been two of the most significant aspects of modern creative writing. In order to grasp the evolving reality, novelists must assume new creative forms in which the reader joins the realms of secrecy and marginalization. Those looking for the positions of the novelist critics will notice that contemporary writing has occupied a distinguished position due to the issues it raises regarding humanity and the homeland and pushing its readers to become conscious and understand what is lacking. The issues of the homeland have become thorny issues due to the imagination of the novelist and his intellectuality. It became more and more evident. The novel, with its transformation and development in content and structure, has become an autonomous literary genre that hides complex topics beyond the words. Its reader must search for distinct critical mechanisms to read it and decode its words. Hence, contemporary novelists did not write fictional texts arbitrarily. But, behind every text there was a significance and a human issue affecting the community whose conditions deteriorated socially and politically. From the above, we will try, in this research paper, to dig into the depth of the issue and reveal the features of the contemporary fictional text and its marginalization. Perhaps the most important question is: Did contemporary creative writing really contribute to educating societies? And revealed the issues that are absent and marginalized? Will the continuation of this type of writing change and solve the nation's crises? In order to answer these questions, we have to research contemporary creative writing and dive into the most important cultural, social, political and even ideological systems.

Instrumentalizing the book: Anne Carson’s Nox and books as archives

This article introduces an experimental mode of contemporary writing and bookmaking that I call multimodal book-archives, an emergent mode of contemporary literature that constructs narratives and textual sequences through the collection and representation of reproduced texts and other artifacts. In multimodal book-archives the book-object is presented as a container designed to preserve and transmit textual artifacts. In this article, I examine Anne Carson’s Nox (2010) as a case study in archival poetics, exemplifying the “archival turn” in contemporary literature. My analysis draws attention to how writing, subjectivity, knowledge, history, and memory in the digital age are increasingly configured through distributed networks of people and artifacts in different social and institutional spaces, demonstrating how Nox functions not only as an instrument of psychological rejuvenation, but as an aesthetic instrument for documenting, ordering, listing, and juxtaposing disparate bits of information and memory into cathartic self-knowledge. Carson’s archival poetics is deeply personal, laden with private symbols and metaphors that readers are asked to collocate, cross-reference, and translate as part of the archival reading process. If grief is a kind of chaos, then Carson’s archival poetics instrumentalizes the book as a tool for ordering that chaos into something manageable, useful, even beautiful.

Ashamed of One’s Sexism, Mourning One’s Friends

One of the most important questions for feminist research on men and masculinity concerns how men can change and become more affected by feminism and less engaged in sexism. Here, men who identify as feminist, pro-feminist or anti-sexist have been considered to be of particular interest. This article contributes to the emerging research on men’s engagement with feminism by analysing contemporary writing about gender relations, inequality and masculinity, more specifically books about men published in Sweden, 2004-2015. Focusing on lived-experience descriptions, the analysis shows how a range of emotions are central to the processes where men encounter and are becoming affected by feminism. The emotions identified include happy ones such as relief, but a more prominent place is given to negative emotions such as alienation, shame, frustration, as well as loss and mourning. Drawing on Ahmed’s model of emotions as bound up with encounters with others, the article highlights how of men’s engagement with feminism is embedded within interpersonal relations with others, particularly women partners, men friends, and children.

Where the Racial State Meets the Black Atlantic: Reflections on Winfried Siemerling’s The Black Atlantic Reconsidered

Winfried Siemerling’s The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History, and the Presence of the Historical Past, to put it mildly, is an impressive piece of scholarship that will stand as one of the definitive works on the histories of Black writing in Canada for the foreseeable future. In his preface, Siemerling states that he embarked upon this undertaking when he learned, to his surprise (one is reminded here, incidentally, of Katherine McKittrick’s injunction that Black Canadian Studies is always constituted as a “surprise”), that there had been little written about Black contemporary writing aside from a few of the comprehensive and encyclopedic works that George Elliot Clarke published in the early to mid-1990s. It is this pioneering work upon which Siemerling builds. He starts with a discussion of “Modernity and Canadian Time-Spaces of the Black Atlantic” in his first chapter and introduction, where he lays out the analytical and conceptual approach of the work. Part 1, “Early Testimony and the Black Canadian Nineteenth Century,” includes chapters titled “Slavery and Early Black Canadian Writing” and “The Black Canadian Nineteenth Century.” Part 2, “The Presence of the Past,” highlights chapters that expand on the themes of “Slavery, the Black Canadian Nineteenth Century, and Caribbean Contexts in Contemporary Black Canadian Writing” and move into a discussion of what he calls “Other Black Canadas” and “Coda: Other Canadas, Other Americas, the Black Atlantic Reconsidered.”