Portuguese
540 — Luso-Brazilian Literature | MALAS 600A
Contemporary Legacies of Colonialism,
in the 20th and 21st-Century Brazilian and Portuguese Novel
Fall
2018 | Wednesdays, 4 p.m. to 6:40 p.m.
Prof.
Ricardo Vasconcelos
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.
