Literary Connections Between South Africa And The Lusophone World

Literary Connections between South Africa and the Lusophone World connects literatures and cultures of South Africa and the Portuguese-speaking nations of Africa and beyond, and is set within literary and cultural studies. The chapters gathered in this volume reinforce the critical and ongoing conversations in comparative and world literature from perspectives of the South. It outlines some possible theoretical and methodological starting points for a comparative framework that targets, transnationally, literatures from the South. This volume is an additional step to renew the critical potentialities of comparative literary studies (Spivak 2009) as well as of humanistic criticism itself (Said 2004) as South Africa and the Lusophone world (except its former colonizer, Portugal) are outside the spatial and cultural dimension usually defined as European and/or North American. In this sense and due to the evident geographical and socio-historical links between these regions, critical scholarship on their literary connections can contribute to unprecedented perspectives of representational practices within a broader contextual dimension, and in so doing, provides the emergence of what Boaventura de Sousa Santos called “epistemologies of the South” (Santos 2016), as it considers cultural exchanges in the space of so-called “overlapping territories” and “intertwined histories” (Said 1993).

The six contributions to this volume provide a survey of some of the best contemporary literature of Portuguese-speaking Africa: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Sao TomT and Prfncipe. Includes a bibliography of the literature from Lusophone Africa published between 1975 and 1994.

Dissident Authorship in Mozambique: the Case of António Quadros is the first monograph on the literary works of the pennames of Portuguese poet and painter António Quadros (1933-1994). The book uses Quadros's quirky case-- a Portuguese man who lived in colonial and post-independence Mozambique, where he published poetry and prose under three pennames--João Pedro Grabato Dias, Frey Ioannes Garabatus, and Mutimati Barnabé Joãoto--to examine the question of what it means to be an author in Mozambique and how authorship changed after the end of Portuguese colonial rule. Quadros's engagement with the question of the authors' place and function in authoritarian contexts stands as a fruitful counterpoint to the influential essays by Roland Barthes ('The Death of the Author', 1968) and Michel Foucault ('What is an Author?', 1969), the publication of which coincided with Quadros's literary début in 1968. Quadros's interesting and useful contributions to the question of Mozambican authorship are analysed in historical context and read alongside postcolonial and decolonial theory. Tom Stennett address the political implications of Barthes's and Foucault's erasure of authorial identity and their respective challenges to authorial authority. He makes the case for an approach to the question of authorship that takes into account the anonymous agents and institutions--such as editors, political parties and the State--that are involved in the conferring of authority onto certain authors and readers. In contrast to much extant scholarship on Mozambican authorship, which has tended to focus on questions related to identity and canonicity, Dissident Authorship addresses these themes as well as those of readership, authority, power, and representation.

Situates the cultures of Portuguese-speaking Africa within the postcolonial, global era.

This collection of critical essays covers a range of literary forms and discusses the political, historical and ethnic contexts of lusophone writings. The book features general essays about national literatures, as well as articles devoted to writers including Luandino Vieira and Agostinho Neto.

Considering the growing interest in South African Literature at the moment, this study looks at both the Anglophone literature of South Africa and the lusophone literature of Angola and Mozambique. Stefan Helgesson suggests that the prevalence of ‘colonial’ languages such as English and Portuguese in ‘anticolonial’ or ‘postcolonial’ African Literature is primarily an effect of the print network. Helgesson aims to demystify the authority of English and Portuguese by stressing the materiality of the print medium and emphasising the strong transnational and transcontinental vectors of southern African literature after the Second World War.

The Changing Face of African Literature combines both the large picture – a synopsis of current trends in African literature – and the small: studies of individual texts and of themes across several texts. The large and the small are linked by recurring themes, such as gender and sexuality, the nation-state and its collapse, AIDS, war, and suffering. The volume is comparative, bringing together literature in at least five languages and from at least ten national literatures. Such a large, comparative frame is implied by most discussion of African literature but is too seldom seen. At the same time, the collection also problematizes the comparison: the goal is to make clear what African literatures have in common but also where they diverge. What difference do distinct literary traditions, readerships, and publishing patterns make to literatures which share a common thematic and so many of the same questions and needs? By juxtaposing contemporary texts form several traditions, the intention of this collection is to bring out the themes that are currently dominant in African literatures generally. After a preface by Liz Gunner and a wide-ranging introduction by the editors, the collection presents keynote essays on new paradigms in African literature, before treating specific themes – recent crime fiction, the Afrikaans and anglophone novel, feminist literature, ‘migritude’ – and studies of recent works by individual authors such as André Brink, Henri Djombo, Pie Tshibanda, Bessora, Nadine Gordimer, and Paulina Chiziane, as well as the South African television series Yizo Yizo.

This fully updated new edition of The Routledge Companion to World Literature contains ten brand new chapters on topics such as premodern world literature, migration studies, world history, artificial intelligence, global Englishes, remediation, crime fiction, Lusophone literature, Middle Eastern literature, and oceanic studies. Separated into four key sections, the volume covers: the history of world literature through significant writers and theorists from Goethe to Said, Casanova and Moretti the disciplinary relationship of world literature to areas such as philology, translation, globalization, and diaspora studies theoretical issues in world literature, including gender, politics, and ethics; and a global perspective on the politics of world literature Comprehensive yet accessible, this book is ideal as an introduction to world literature or for those looking to extend their knowledge of this essential field.