Paper short abstract:

This is a comparative study of Western and Chinese writings during the colonial period that would shed new light on our understanding of the colonial and the anticolonial discourses on the colony Macao, which could be a spiritual source of postcolonialism.

Paper long abstract:

Macao has the distinction of being the first European settlement in Asia and the last of Portugal's colonies. For complex social, cultural and administrative reasons, Portuguese was never spoken widely by the Chinese population of Macau. On the other hand, Western and Chinese writers within or without Macau have written a lot about Macao either as an insider or an outsider of the colony. Thus, a comparative study of these Western and Chinese writings during the colonial period would shed new light on our understanding of the colonial and the anticolonial discourses on the colony Macao, which could be a spiritual source of postcolonialism.

Postcolonial literary studies have tended to focus on twentieth-century authors. Indeed, it is probably true to say that the tradition of the nineteenth-century writing is anathema to postcolonial study, unless it is to deconstruct from a postcolonial point of view. John McLeod points up the problematic nature of attempts at general theories of postcolonial literature, which do not take sufficient account of different colonial/postcolonial experiences, not to mention of course, that the theory relates specifically to literature written in English, and takes little or no account of the colonial/postcolonial experiences given voice in other languages, among them, Portuguese and Chinese. Perhaps McLeod's most important assertion for the purposes of this paper is that just as postcolonialism does not begin with political independence, nor does colonialism end with it. It may well be that literature in such environment as Macao should be more profitably studied in comparative terms.