A New MALAS Class! Contemporary Legacies of Colonialism, in the 20th and 21st-Century Brazilian and Portuguese Novel | Professor Ricardo Vasconcelos

Portuguese 540 — Luso-Brazilian Literature | MALAS 600A

Contemporary Legacies of Colonialism,

in the 20^th and 21^st-Century Brazilian and Portuguese Novel

Fall 2018 | Wednesdays, 4 p.m. to 6:40 p.m.

Prof. Ricardo Vasconcelos

rvasconcelos@mail.sdsu.edu | https://sdsu.academia.edu/RicardoVasconcelos

 

This course studies different lingering legacies of the colonial past in the Portuguese and Brazilian societies, as described by contemporary novels from those countries.

            In Brazil, these include namely the economic inequalities and racial asymmetries that continue to plague the country, in a relation that in many ways is still reminiscent of the historic dialectic of the Casa Grande (the big house) and the Sanzala (the slave quarters), even when set in contexts of modern, cosmopolitan spaces, such as São Paulo or Brasília. We will discuss Luiz Ruffato’s* Eles Eram Muitos Cavalos (2007), which portrays a day in the life of a broad range of inhabitants of the city of São Paulo — an unofficial capital of South America, with its 21 million dwellers — and depicts side by side both the experience of the resident of the periphery and that of the member of the upper classes. The course also studies João Almino’s Entre Facas, Algodão (2018), a subtle x-ray of the current state of affairs in Brazil, with regard to the emancipation of disenfranchised social classes in recent decades. The novel displays several contrasts between utopia and reality, the rural Northeast and the idealized avant-garde capital of Brasília; ultimately questioning whether the subaltern will ever see recognized their claim to the legacy of the privileged in contemporary Brazil.

With regard to Portugal, the course will study novels that address the process of gaining awareness about the country’s colonial and imperial rule, as this came to an end, as well as discuss the subsequent implications for the nation. We will study Lídia Jorge’s* A Costa dos Murmúrios (1988), in its portrayal of the Portuguese loss of innocence with regard to the colonial war waged in Africa (namely Mozambique), to preserve an imperial vision; and focus on the perspective of women with regard to the conflict, and the consequences of the war upon those women. We will likewise study Dulce Maria Cardoso’s O Retorno (2012), a coming-of-age novel that represents the traumatic and highly symbolic repatriation to the mainland of Portuguese citizens, in 1975, upon the independence of Angola. The novel focuses both on the conditions of life in pre-independence, colonial Luanda, and on the perception of the Portuguese retornado, the repatriated, as a symbol of the nation’s colonial past, one Portugal was eager to eschew, in its path to join the European Union.

All readings in Portuguese. Portuguese undergraduates will complete all class work in Portuguese. Graduate students will develop their class work in their language of specialization (typically Portuguese, Spanish, or English). This course meets the Spanish MA requirement of “Knowledge of Portuguese.”

*Award-winning authors Luiz Ruffato and Lídia Jorge are expected to visit SDSU during the semester, for public lectures and class workshops.