Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to propose a broad reading, through literature, of the phenomenon of Portugyese nineteenth and twentyeth century Orientalism in the way that it is displaced from the Asian Empire, meaning that it develops as kind of discourse that uses the Orient as a symbolical center, but not as a economical and political one.

Paper long abstract:

All the recent critical investigations on Portuguese Orientalism (Hespanha, Laborinho, Perez, Jackson) raise as crucial issue its connection with the peculiar history of Portugal's Empire as to explain the shaping of Portuguese Orientalism as a phenomenon diverse from other European Orientalisms. This paper aims to propose a broad reading, through literature, of the phenomenon of nineteenth and twentyeth century Orientalism in the way that it is displaced from the Asian Empire, meaning that it develops as kind of discourse that uses the Orient as a symbolical center, but not as a economical and political one. I shall argue therefore in the three following ways: First, Portuguese Orientalism develops in the interval between the XVIIIth Century demise of an Empire based on the East and the menaced survival of Empire elsewhere; second, the aesthetic adaptation orientalist authors make of other European orientalisms shows another kind of cleavage between the heritage of sixteenth and seventeenth century cultural materials created in relation to the East and modern European literary aesthetics; finally, the contemporary and post-imperial preservation of orientalist tropes shows that Portuguese Orientalism outlived itself, because it works concomitantly with the still active ideological need for a cultural or spiritual Portuguese Empire. I shall be working mostly with poetry, drawing examples from Fernando Pessoa, Wenceslau de Moraes and António Manuel Couto Viana.