Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the differential receptions of ancient Greek tragedy across two distinct colonial populations in South Africa, exploring how the performative ambivalence in the Hellenistic imaginary opens up a practice of anti-memorial translation that resists Western epistemological hegemony.

Paper long abstract:

The history of colonial domination and resistance in South Africa during the past two centuries is one overdetermined by the violence of language, in and through translation. This paper will examine how the hegemonic force of ancient Greek classical tradition, itself a translation of antiquity that forms the imaginary core of Western civilization, was reinforced, resisted, and appropriated by two colonized populations, Afrikaner and native African, between and against their tripartite relation within Anglophone colonial rule. Drawing from Jacques Derrida's reading of The Task of the Translator and Tejaswini Niranjana's formulation of postcolonial translation as dislocation, this paper approaches classical Greek tragedy as a form of engaging with non-identity in the authority of language that is intensified when brought to bear in the context of the Benjaminian injunction to translate. Through an examination the role of Afrikaner Greek scholarship during the early years of Afrikaner independence as well as a reading of contemporary dramatic adaptations of Greek texts by Athol Fugard and Yael Faber, this paper will explore how South African performative engagement with the ambivalent hybridization at the root of this Western cultural imaginary counter-poses a paradoxical injunction to forgetting as a corollary to the repetition injunction of translation, opening up a practice of translation that resists logocentric Western epistemology.

Paper short abstract:

Since Ovid, metamorphosis is a major model for Western literature. This paper raises questions and proposes meanings for this genre as a symbolic appropriation within Portuguese early modern poetry. Describing metamorphosis on both sides of the Atlantic is a way of taming colonial landscapes.

Paper long abstract:

During Early Modern times, Classical poetry served as a model to emulate, and among the models, Ovid's Metamorphoses was particularly fertile. Within the Portuguese literature there are important re-elaborations of Ovid's lessons, being the Adamastor episode from Os Lusíadas the most important. The aim of this paper is to recognize the metamorphosis as a poetic genre that performs a literary appropriation of elements that belong to the Atlantic world for the symbolic system of Portuguese poetry. For that, this presentation presents the most important poetic texts that describe metamorphosis, analyses both literary and geographical elements that those texts incorporate and how do they do that, and finally, proposes a theoretical framework to understand the importance of metamorphosis as a literary genre/topic for the validation of the Portuguese Colonial Atlantic Empire. This exercise claims, in a broader sense, a new understanding of the function of poetry, above all narrative poetry, for the Portuguese Imperial project.

Paper short abstract:

In A Arca (1971) and O Povo é Nós (1979), António Quadros, through his Luso-Mozambican alter ego Grabato Dias, respectively critiques the colonial regime and Frelimo's government. The collections raise questions about the role of poetry in the colonial and post-colonial Mozambican context.

Paper long abstract:

In the 1971 ode A Arca, Grabato Dias — the Luso-Mozambican alter ego of António Quadros — describes his position as a duplicitous intermediary between a power apparatus that he opposes and a subjugated people unaware of their bondage. Grabato Dias is a privileged member of a colonised people who takes advantage of his proximity to the colonial authorities to sing a 'double song' that 'flatters' his master, at the same time that it encodes 'a sarrazina clandestina / Da verdade'. Quadros cryptically interpolates the settler community in Lourenço Marques, of which he was a member, to stage a rebellion against the colonial state. However, he sets strict parameters for the impact of his anti-authoritarian ode: he fears that his contemporaries will not understand his impenetrable verse.

In O Povo é Nós (1979), published in the post-independence period, Quadros critiques a post-Third Party Congress Frelimo. Quadros's poetic strategies in the post-independence collection are similar to those deployed in the anti-colonial ode: ambiguous subject positions and a doubled and re-doubled poetic discourse that speaks to multiple audiences.

Through my readings of these collections, I will address the following questions. How effective are Quadros's poems in interpolating his readers? To what extent does he buy into the discourse elaborated by Amilcar Cabral and later assimilated by Frelimo that poetry is a 'weapon' in the anti-colonial struggle and the nationalist project? In a Manichean political context, is there space for independent writers and thinkers, who refuse to identify with one side or the other?

Paper short abstract:

The role of the book is a compendium for preserving the tradition of poetry-sung Arab-Andalusian music. In fact, the preservation of a multi-secular heritage stemming from a multilingual and transcultural oral know-how, is now mainly accessible through collections and media collection.

Paper long abstract:

At this conference, we'll study the role of the book as a compendium in preserving the tradition of poetry-sung of Maghrebin scholarly music, known as Arab-Andalusian music. In fact, the preservation of a multi-secular heritage stemming from a multilingual and transcultural oral know-how, is now mainly through collections and collection media. On the one hand, by the development of beautiful books and on the other hand, by the culture of digitization of rare manuscripts and the provision of resources in lines. For this, we will put forward, the role of Gallica sites and Algerian cultural heritage in this desire. In addition, we will show how the beautiful book makes it possible to become the backdrop of inherent knowledge: translation, editing and of course, music. Therefore, the reader becomes by his quest and his curiosity, both the custodian, the Legatee and the keeper of a timeless culture.

Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses preliminary findings of on-going research on modernity and revolution in Ethiopia. It focuses on the poet of the ethio military socialist regime Assefa GMT, and his book The Voice, dedicated to Agostinho Neto, inquiring its rhetoric and context of production, and present erasure.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents and discusses the preliminary findings of an on-going research on modernity and revolution in Ethiopia, focusing the cultural environment with special regard (in this case) to the literary production in the last fifty years, against the broader picture of postcolonialism, internationalism and pan-africanism.

The episode brought into attention concerns the awarded and once most praised poet of the Ethiopian Socialist Military regime, Assefa Gebremariam Tesemma, who dedicated his book The Voice (1979) to the Angolan poet President Agostinho Neto whom he met in Luanda at the Afro-Asian Writers Association Conference.

Assefa passed away last year in exile. National press ignored it while praising the emergence of the newly appointed Prime-Minister, and while, in the streets, images printed on stickers of Colonel Mengistu Hailemariam were sold side by side with the new and past Ethiopian 'heroes'. The multiplicated cummulative reproduction if images is not yet followed by the public debate about an almost silenced period of Ethiopian contemporary history, nor by new reading and study of literary and art works bringing into the light the recent and traumatic past that post-1991 regime attempted to erase.

Besides a brief analysis of the poetic rhetorics and topics of The Voice, the paper will question the ambiguities between the rehabilitation of Mengistu's image as new icon for consumption, and the erasure of the poet's pamphletary words. Is one word finally more powerful than ten thousand reproduced images?

Paper short abstract:

This paper is meant to be a voyage through the novel La Traversée, by the Algerian writer Mouloud Mammeri, around the topics of memory, alterity, cultural universe and space. It aims at reflecting on the multiple forms of representing identity.

Paper long abstract:

The notion of sociological subject, based on the concept of identity as a result of the interaction of the “I” with society, of a dialogue of the “I” with cultural universes, of a connection between the interior and private space with the exterior and public, has led to a destabilization of a unified subject and traditional society. This fragmentation of references, connected to an homogeneous vision shaken by the processes of decolonization and globalization, has shaped the 20th century and intensified the debates around identity.

Many of the postcolonial narratives are considerations on the end of colonialism and attempts to recover the cultural authenticity and the traditional identities. In a synchronic way, the dissatisfaction in face of the institutional powers in the recent Nation-States has drawn the production of critical narratives. They offer alternative readings on the national and identity project and have as reference point spaces situated at the margins of the State.

Distant from the center, they are spaces of reflection on identity and they help deconstructing the concept of unity. These counter-loci are heterotopias, meaning that they are spaces of the “other” which go against the “I” leading it to an deep, essential, interpellation. This paper aims at being a voyage through the novel La Traversée, by the Algerian writer Mouloud Mammeri, around the topics of memory, alterity, cultural universe and space. It aims at reflecting on the multiple forms of representing identity.

Paper short abstract:

Role-playing and masks are the core of the novel As Visitas do Dr. Valdez by João Paulo Borges Coelho, serving both colonizer and colonized and being both a means for questioning or maintaining colonial social order and the dynamics of power and submission.

Paper long abstract:

In the novel As Visitas do Dr. Valdez, by João Paulo Borges Coelho, role-playing and masks (literal or figurative) are central topics, connected to power or submission within social relationships, during the transition between the colonial regime and independence in Mozambique. They serve several purposes in the story, such as to invoke the past and insert it into the rapidly changing present - through the mask of Dr. Valdez concocted by Vicente -; to momentarily extend a political and social order that is progressively wearing away - through the authoritative mask of Sá Caetana - ; or to introduce without violence the essence of change into former colonial relationships, which predicts the end of the colonial way of living.

Sá Caetana, coming from a colonizing family, uses a traditional

Authoritative attitude towards Vicente that she does not wish to see subverted; a mask which she cannot forgo. Vicente, on the other hand, is divided between the submissive and obedient memory of his father, Cosme Paulino, who was a servant to the family, and the new callings of independence and decolonization. This role-playing and these masks lead the characters into a dead-lock without solution: the simultaneous impossibility of keeping up the role-playing or of dismantling it entirely. In this proposal, we aim to analyze how, in the story, wearing a certain social mask is both part of the colonial past and of the decolonized present and future, and how these masks represent an impediment to the creation of real and emotional connections.