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- Convenors:
-
Marco Bucaioni
(Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa)
Rosa Fina (CLEPUL, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa)
Ana Paula Tavares (Faculdade de Letras Unviversidade de Lisboa)
Francesco Genovesi (University of Dar es Salaam )
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- Discussants:
-
Dênis Augusto da Silva
(University of Lisbon)
Marco Bucaioni (Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa)
Marisa Mourinha (University of Lisbon)
- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Language and Literature (x) Decoloniality & Knowledge Production (y)
- Location:
- Philosophikum, S94
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to discuss future implications of literary production shifts in Lusophone Africa and Portugal, which may redefine critical perspectives and modify the field. Our goal is to reflect on a discipline which does not only have an academic impact, but influences Africa's world-vision.
Long Abstract:
African Literatures in Portuguese have existed as an epistemological unit and academic discipline since the 1960s, when critics and theoreticians began to circumscribe their autonomous literary spaces.
Around 1990, in a context of acceleration of world book production and translation flow, a younger generation of authors enlarged the corpus of these literatures with new poetics and themes and arrived at relatively high world-consecration levels. In these two phases the Portuguese publishing system played a very important role in the selection and promotion of those literatures, in a post-imperial situation in which the centre holds and distributes the symbolic capital for literary periphery.
Around 2015, a further shift occurred among the Portuguese publishers, which had stopped some year earlier to invest in new African names: a new generation of black Portuguese authors took the scene, occupying part of the domestic space of African-themed literature. The shift from African literatures to black-Portuguese literature can prove disciplinary and theoretically challenging.
This panel aims to discuss present and future implications of these shifts, which may redefine the critical perspective and modify the field: while the focus was previously on the fight for independence and on postcolonial exoticism, in recent years identity politics seem to be privileged, drifting away from the African continent and focussing on European blackness. The panel's final goal is to reflect on the future of a discipline which does not only have an academic impact, but profoundly influences the world-vision of the African continent.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 June, 2023, -Marco Bucaioni (Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa)
Paper short abstract:
African Literatures in Portuguese are a consecrated field in literary studies. However, their position is challenged by new trends in publishing and literary creation, by the problematising of Afrodescendants and by methodological changes. This communication's aim is to tackle these shifts.
Paper long abstract:
African Literatures in Portuguese emerged as a literary archive from the 1950s and as an institutionalized discipline from the 1970s. Nowadays they have a steady presence in the Portuguese-speaking academic world and beyond.
After two surges in publishing and expanding the literary archive and canon – the first one in the years just after the Carnation Revolution, and the second one starting around 1990 and continuing until after the turn of the century –, around 2010 Portuguese main imprints renounced to the role they played in the institution and consecration of these literatures.
In the meanwhile, new ways of reading African literatures emerged, imported in part from the English-speaking world, with a new sight: an epistemological change from “Africa” to “black literature” in Brazil and also in Portugal is currently ongoing. At the same time, no new African author was widely consecrated by Portuguese institutions – the last ones being Ondjaki and Conceição Lima in the 2000s It seems that the circuit of importing literary material from Africa to the benefit of the Portuguese public (and Portuguese and Brazilian and international academia) stopped.
A situation of possible crises emerges, the encroachment in which the discipline is forced to by the absence of new authors stops the flow of new literature. At the same time, many colleagues active in African studies are focussing their interest on Black-European and/or Black-American literature, with a different theoretical approach.
This communications aims at discussing possible disciplinary futures and clashes.
Marisa Mourinha (University of Lisbon)
Paper short abstract:
This paper focusses specifically on how Africa and African experience and heritage are portrayed and dealt with in the works of two contemporary women writers: Paulina Chiziane (Mozambique) and Conceição Lima (São Tomé and Príncipe).
Paper long abstract:
As a part of the AfroLab research project, my work takes into account the role of Portuguese institutions on the consecration and dissemination of Portuguese-language African literatures. These can be said to occupy a place at a crossroad of multiple marginalities, insofar as they add the peripherality of their African origin with that of their language of choice, given the marginal status of Portuguese language. In this context, one interesting research point arises from the fact that, given the rules and modes of consecration and circulation of cultural goods, Portuguese-language African authors find themselves torn between two worlds – one language, two continents – since, for them, the locus of production (their African countries) is markedly different from their primary foreign locus of reception (Portuguese cultural institutions).
This paper focusses specifically on how Africa and African experience, ancestry and heritage are portrayed and dealt with in the works of two contemporary women writers: Paulina Chiziane (Mozambique) and Conceição Lima (São Tomé and Príncipe). Particularly bearing in mind that their international readership includes, even excluding translation phenomena, a pool of Portuguese readers, it is interesting to assess what kind of Africa they convey, with their writing. Given the temptation of commodifying cultural difference, this paper pays attention to the strategies these writers use to deal with the European tendency to exoticise African experience and how their work seeks to draw universal streaks out of local traits.
Dênis Augusto da Silva (University of Lisbon)
Paper short abstract:
50 years after the conquest of political independence, what kind of critical gesture does the literatures from African Countries in Portuguese demand? This paper aims to question the epistemological unit of these literatures, in their aspects no longer framed in the context of independence wars.
Paper long abstract:
The so-called Portuguese-speaking African literatures – from Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe – were mainly interpreted from the perspective of social issues that emerged in the context of the political independence achieved, such as the constitution of the literature produced in these countries and its relationship with the formation of their national identities. However, about fifty years after the end of independence wars, what kind of critical gesture does such literatures demand? This proposal aims to reflect on the present state of the so-called African literatures in Portuguese, no longer framed by the social contexts of liberation fights. In this sense, it will be necessary to problematize the literatures of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe as epistemological units now and in the future, considering, for example, that African literatures in Portuguese are not at all independent from the literary institutions of the former imperial center and, therefore, the difficulty of predicting their future autonomy. In articulation with the reflections about the combined and uneven development in literature by the Warwick Research Collective, this work wishes to address possible theoretical adjustments which African literatures in Portuguese may suggest, if and when read under a critical positioning attentive to the autonomy of each work and each geographical context.