Intra-colonialism ou L’animotion of the Black Atlantic: J. E. Agualusa´s O vendedor de passados

Abstract

In the lineage of Dostoevsky and Kafka, the angolan novelist José Eduardo Agualusa deploys protagonists or narrators prone to be less porte-paroles than animots. Jacques Derrida's 'Ecce animor [...] assuming the title of an autobiographical animal, in the form of a risky, fabulous, or chimerical response to the question"but me, who I am?" Is appropriated in order to trace the re(p)tilinf of history in and on the mosaic of angolan memory. The eponymous albino protagonist of the Book of Chameleons, Féliz Ventura (future happiness guaranteed?), is a man with an unusual occupation. If your lineage isn't sufficiently distinguished, he'll change that for you. If your family isn't quitte as glorious as you'd like, Féliz Ventura can make you a new one. Féliz Ventura is a seller of pasts. But who is whatching him? Who is telling his tale? Who, or what, is on his tail? L'animot juste or juste l'animot? This meditation on  post-colonial intra-colonialism focusses on an economy of transformed pasts, laundered through the currency of exchanged identities. Analysis of an albino function explores a pardo - a shade of Grey - dimension in a post - colonial and atlantic-facing Angola, reinventing its past, re-inscribing its history, after failed intrusions of soviet expansionism and cuban interventionism. Now embroiled in a globalinzing language less of paralyzing animosity than of risk-taking animots.