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).
Anita de Melo is senior lecturer in Portuguese and literature at the University of Cape Town. Ludmylla Lima is associate professor of literatures in Portuguese Language at UNILAB - Bahia. John T. Maddox IV is associate professor of Spanish and African American studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter One: Revisiting the Adamastor Myth in Fernando Pessoa's "O Mostrengo" and Andre Brink's The First Life Of Adamastor, Paulo Ferreira Chapter Two: A Thread of Gold: Fernando Pessoa, Hubert Jennings, and Classical Education in Durban, Jeffrey Murray Chapter Three: Van Der Post's Postcolonial Melancholia and Zimler's Reparational Mourning in Novels on the San, John T. Maddox IV Chapter Four: Ruy Duarte De Carvalho's Border Literature in As paisagens propicias, Alice Girotto Chapter Five: Why Do They Kill Us?: The Strange Neighborhood and Necropolitics in Lilia Momple's Novel Neighbours, Nilza Laice Chapter Six: Last Dinner at Polana: Peter Wilhelm's L.M., Ludmylla Lima Chapter Seven: The Degrading Figuration of the Intellectual on the Periphery of Capitalism: A Comparative Study of Chico Buarque's Essa Gente and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, Edvaldo A. Bergamo Chapter Eight: Dissident Authorship in Post-Colonial Mozambique and Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Cases Of Antonio Quadros and J. M. Coetzee, Tom Stennett Chapter Nine: Narrating the World from Africa: Joao Paulo Borges Coelho and J. M. Coetzee, Marta Banasiak Afterword About the Contributors
This book represents a groundbreaking contribution to the scholarship on African literatures and particularly for the analysis of the complex and intertwined relations between South Africa, Mozambique and, more broadly, the Portuguese-speaking world. The collection offers compelling readings of these literary connections engaging with relevant critical debates within the fields of comparative studies, postcolonial theory, and world literature and, therefore, advancing new critical paths within contemporary literary studies. -- Elena Brugioni, University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil Literary Connections Between South Africa and the Lusophone World is a refreshing volume, whose essays provide remarkable insights into the cultural composition of Southern Africa and its colonial and postcolonial inheritances. As the first collection of essays to engage the Portuguese-speaking world's many touchpoints with South Africa, this original volume offers a wonderful model for rethinking the Global South beyond colonial boundaries. -- Lanie Millar, University of Oregon
