Romance-nação e devires identitários nas literaturas de língua portuguesa: Portugal e Angola

Abstract

This thesis is the result of a study of Angolan and Portuguese novels published after 1975, that is, after the Carnation Revolution and the Independence of the Portuguese Colonies in Africa, in order to verify the effects of these events in the construction of national identities and in the romanesque genre produced by the two countries. The corpus of analysis consists of the following works: Mayombe by Pepetela, Estação das chuvas by José Eduardo Agualusa, Também os brancos sabem dançar by Kalaf Epalanga, Os transparentes by Ondjaki, Os cus de Judas by António Lobo Antunes, A costa dos murmúrios by Lídia Jorge, O retorno by Dulce Maria Cardoso. The research led to the formulation of the concepts of novel-nation and character-nation, as representations of spaces and protagonist identities in the narratives that reconfigure the idea of nation built by colonialism. Theoretically, it is an interdisciplinary approach that uses different areas of knowledge such as Literary Theory, History, Sociology, Geography, Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Philosophy; this being the one that, aligned with literary formulations, contributes the most to the understanding of the identities of nations, of the characters, narrators and of the novel itself as becoming. Such an understanding is based on what the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari postulated in line with other theorists such as Achille Mbembe, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Zigmunt Bauman, Eduardo Lourenço, Boaventura Sousa Santos, Luís Kandjimbo among others. Initially, a brief overview of the evolution of the 19th century novel and its omniscient monologism to polyphony is made, and then we think of narratives as rhizomatics and identities as becoming. Then, the concepts of lusophony, universal literature and world-literature are questioned in order to question them as to the possible neocolonial contents that may cross them. Finally, the concepts developed throughout the thesis are systematized: the novel-nation and the character-nation as becoming and a way of reading novels about the individual and collective identities that make up what is modernly conceived as a nation.