Paulo de Medeiros

War Pics: Photographic Representations of the Colonial War

A análise das representações da guerra colonial tem sido escassa e limitada a textos literários. Este artigo pretende examinar as fotografias da guerra colonial que foram publicadas em livros tendo em conta a sua relativa escassez e o facto de não haver dados sobre as condições de produção dessas imagens. Tenta-se assim uma reflexão preliminar sobre a fotografia de guerra no contexto específico da guerra colonial. A guerra colonial aparece através destas imagens como uma actividade quase pré-moderna, e até a morte parece tomar-se banal. Algumas das imagens mais marcantes são analisadas em pormenor sendo de salientar que embora não haja romanticização da guerra, há sim processes de romantização e de ironização dos soldados portugueses assim como uma espécie de fetichização dos cadáveres de africanos.

Post-imperial Nostalgia and Miguel Gomes’ Tabu

With Europe in a prolonged and threatening political crisis, post-imperial nostalgia, the dreaming of a glorious past that never was, is a current threat. Fuelled by instability, a loss of hope for a better future, and the collapse of emancipatory ideologies in the face of a seemingly unstoppable global capitalism that has entered a savage phase, imperial nostalgia is more than a simple palliative for the present malaise. In the case of Portugal, with a still-fragile democratic society after many decades of numbing totalitarian rule, imperial nostalgia is all the more ominous given the fact that the loss of empire has not yet been properly assimilated by the society at large. Miguel Gomes’ recent and internationally acclaimed film Tabu (2012) plays along this fraught ideological terrain by imagining a ‘lost Africa’ that plays in aesthetically seductive imagery, shot in black and white, the dream of a more innocent and hopeful era in the current imagination of a Portugal wrecked by debilitating and systemic sovereign debt. The film, also effusively received by the general public, appeals to the past and ironizes it, both in historical terms as well as in relation to other cinema and especially its cited predecessor, Friedrich W. Murnaus eponymous 1931 film. A more detailed analysis of the films imbrication in cinematic and imperial histories can help sketch out an analysis of the complexity of post-imperial nostalgia.With Europe in a prolonged and threatening political crisis, post-imperial nostalgia, the dreaming of a glorious past that never was, is a current threat. Fuelled by instability, a loss of hope for a better future, and the collapse of emancipatory ideologies in the face of a seemingly unstoppable global capitalism that has entered a savage phase, imperial nostalgia is more than a simple palliative for the present malaise. In the case of Portugal, with a still-fragile democratic society after many decades of numbing totalitarian rule, imperial nostalgia is all the more ominous given the fact that the loss of empire has not yet been properly assimilated by the society at large. Miguel Gomes’ recent and internationally acclaimed film Tabu (2012) plays along this fraught ideological terrain by imagining a ‘lost Africa’ that plays in aesthetically seductive imagery, shot in black and white, the dream of a more innocent and hopeful era in the current imagination of a Portugal wrecked by debilitating and systemi...

Review essay : World Literature

For the past 15 years the rapidly advancing field of World Literature has revitalized comparative literary studies, given rise to a series of on-going debates, and also brought about a noticeable increase in university offerings and publishing ventures focused on that elusive concept. Besides the substantive books that have been steadily coming out ever since David Damrosch dusted off the notion of World Literature – then mostly a preserve of publishers of anthologies – we have also seen several readers, companions and introductions being published to serve what clearly is perceived as a rising and expanding market. In part this has to do with the varying, sometimes conflicting, forms of conceptualizing the field. Even if most still refer back to Goethe’s notions of an idealized Weltliteratur, twenty-first-century interpretations necessarily expand and problematize the basic concept from a variety of comparative and theoretical perspectives. This could not but be considering the claims made in the name of World Literature to reshape literary studies, especially in relation to the discipline of Comparative Literature and the field of Postcolonial Studies.

Blindness, invisibility, and the negative inheritance of world literature

World literature can be seen as one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “good things,” a great idealization of the capacities of the human spirit and at the same time a fierce contest for power and dominance. In this contest the question of minor literature invariably surfaces in relation to issues of canonicity and to world literature in general. References to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s work on Franz Kafka inevitably misread its revolutionary potential and become reductive. In the different European literatures, issues stemming from the aftermath of colonialism reveal the bankruptcy of the category of minor literature when one thinks about world literature. Several examples from lusophone writers and others point to the need to rethink the national categorization of literature. Instead of seeing some literatures as minor, Medeiros proposes seeing them as “eccentric,” questioning the division between center and periphery.