Literatures in Portuguese: Atlantic Crossroads

Abstract

I propose to reflect the different features characterizing the relationship among the spaces of portuguese colonialism with a special emphasis on Africa. In doing so, I shall be relying on the concept of contact zones, a working term coined by Mary Louise Pratt in her studies based on cultural encounters to describe their interrelational productive efficiency. Owing to the fact that the relationship between africans and the portuguese, which has been understood as Portugal's "Atlantic  Vocation", portuguese literature seems to reflect upon such a relationship by locating it between a sense of belonging that demands hero-worshipping the past and a desire  to gain an atlantic identity after the last african colonies had been abandoned. In order to broach this subject, I shall be calling upon theoretical proposals about memory and the difficulty of talking about or narrating trauma, based on Walter Benjamin's "The storyteller: reflections on the works of Nicolai Leskov" (1936), here I shall be relying upon notions put forward by Walter Benjamin's "The storyteller: reflections on the works of Nicolai Leskov" (1936), by Pierre Nora's realms of memory: rethinking the french past (1997, 2008), by Márcio Seligmann-Silva (2005, 2008), By Amin Maalouf in Les Identités Meurtrières [translated into english as in The name of identity: violence and the need to belong, 2001]; Homi Bhabha's the location of culture (1994), and Mary Louise Pratt's interrelational term (Imperial eyes: travel writting and  transculturation, 1992). Which offers an efficient interpretational tool for studies about cultural encounters.