José Saramago e o interculturalismo na refabulação das narrativas e da crítica cultural contemporâneas: uma experiência de nomadismo e hospitalidade

Abstract

This thesis aims to develop the study of a new cultural politics and new cultural practices based on a critical dialog between José Saramago and the interculturalism theory, which play a political posture that occupies itself with the cultural interchanges and with the formation of participating partnership. The interculturalism circulates among distinct theoretical positions to debate our cultural inheritance, tracing an analysis that comprises a more combating revision theory of the origins of the current social and cultural hierarchies and a more conciliating theory that emphasizes the hybridization cultural process and detaches a necessity of working different cultures and different cultural subjects. The intercultural politics answers to a necessity of the modern cultural formations, whose cultural hybridism, associated to the incessant goods and people exchanges, conducts to the creation of new partnerships from negotiating politics. To think the concept as social praxis, it will be utilized The raft of stone (A jangada de pedra), The cave (A caverna), Essay about the blindness (Ensaio sobre a cegueira) e Essay about the lucidity (Ensaio sobre a lucidez), by José Saramago. In this reading, it will be brought out the traveler’s and narrator’s metaphorical performance as representations of intercultural practices in the national and international contexts, overland or overseas. The two figures will contribute to discuss the cultural identitary discourse from the intersections between the displacement and the fixity, the universalism and the particularism, the foreigner and the familiar, the alterity and the identity. Therefore, the interculturalism searches the traveler its dynamism and flexibility to be adapted and to assimilate the novelty and the narrator its capability for compiling such information and cultural realizations with the tradition, with the local knowledge, with the interior and the familiar, it means, both contribute to the creation of more floated cultural spaces in which the principle of negotiation and hospitality may be present. Finally, the intercultural politics detaches the importance of encouraging the subject’s active participation over its cultural properties and values, in order to contest the use of cultural politics that provoke alienation and dependence and that, consequently, continue to produce registers of unequal cultural relations and inospitalities. For that, at the same time that the subject should be supported by rights, should be equally followed by duties, words that complement themselves to translate the meanings of justice and dignity for the humans-cultures relation.