Mia Couto: escrita e racismo — ou “a arrogância de um único saber”...

Authors

  • José Paulo Cruz Pereira Universidade do Algarve

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37508/rcl.2020.n43a370

Keywords:

writing, orality, racism, theology, sign

Abstract

We follow here Mia Couto’s distinction between writing as literary creation — a way of “discovering alterity” — and writing as a cultural practice and technical device that may inhibit that discovery. Understood, in its metaphysical sense, as a secondary and an exterior form of sign representation: “a signifier of the signifier”... — writing is also taken by Jacques Derrida, as an internal feature of language itself. Based on the same critical grounds we will read, not only Michel de Certeau, in his L’Écriture de l’histoire, on a certain colonial modernity, marked by the binary opposition writing/orality, but also Mia Couto’s own idea that, if culturally and politically imposed as the source of a unique knowledge, the common sense notion of writing will turn out to be a last haven for racism.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

José Paulo Cruz Pereira, Universidade do Algarve

Nasceu na ilha de Moçambique. Licenciou-se em Línguas e Literaturas Modernas pela Universidade Clássica de Lisboa, onde defendeu, em 1996, tese de mestrado em Literatura Comparada, mais tarde publicada com o título Uma cartografia transtornada: a Guernica de Carlos de Oliveira. Doutorou-se, em 2004, em Literatura Comparada pela Universidade do Algarve, onde leciona Literaturas Estrangeiras de Língua Portuguesa II e Comunicação na Contemporaneidade, e tem ensinado em diversos mestrados — nas áreas dos Estudos Pós-coloniais e dos Estudos Culturais, as quais atualmente investiga como membro do Grupo 7 do Centro de Literaturas e Culturas Lusófonas e Europeias (CLEPUL).

References

ADORNO, Theodor. Esprit du monde et histoire de la nature: digression sur Hegel. Dialectique négative. Paris: Payot, 2001.

AGAMBEN, Giorgio. Temps et histoire: critique de l’instant et du continu. Enfance et histoire. Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2000.

BHABHA, Homi K. The postcolonial and the postmodern: the question of agency. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.

CERTEAU, Michel de. Ethnographie: l’oralité, ou l’espace de l’autre: Léry. L’écriture de l’histoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.

COUTO, Mia. Línguas que não sabemos que sabíamos. In: COUTO, Mia. E se Obama fosse africano? E outras interinvenções. Lisboa: Caminho, 2009a.

COUTO, Mia. Quebrar armadilhas. In: COUTO, Mia. E se Obama fosse africano? E outras interinvenções. Lisboa: Caminho, 2009b.

COUTO, Mia. Encontros e encantos: Guimarães Rosa. In: COUTO, Mia. E se Obama fosse africano? E outras interinvenções. Lisboa: Caminho, 2009c.

COUTO, Mia. Luso-afonias: a lusofonia entre viagens e crimes. In: COUTO, Mia. E se Obama fosse africano? E outras interinvenções. Lisboa: Caminho, 2009d.

COUTO, Mia. Desemparedar o pensamento. O universo num grão de areia. Lisboa: Caminho, 2019.

DERRIDA, Jacques. La fin du livre et le commencement de l’écriture. De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit, 1967a.

DERRIDA, Jacques. La Violence de la lettre: de Lévi-Strauss à Rousseau. De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit, 1967b.

DERRIDA, Jacques. La Pharmacie de Platon. La Dissémination. Paris: Seuil, 1972.

DERRIDA, Jacques. My chances/Mes chances. A rendezvous with some epicurean stereophonies. Psyché: Inventions of the Other. Stanford UP, 2007. v. I.

FOUCAULT, Michel. Two lectures. Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings: 1972-1977. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.

FOUCAULT, Michel. L’Herméneutique du sujet: cours aux Collège de France: 1981-1982. Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2001a.

FOUCAULT, Michel. Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire. Dits et écrits de Michel Foucault (1954-1988). Paris: Gallimard, 2001b. v. I.

LÖWITH, Karl. Hegel. O sentido da história. Lisboa: Edições 70, 1990.

Downloads

Published

2020-04-30

How to Cite

Cruz Pereira, J. P. (2020). Mia Couto: escrita e racismo — ou “a arrogância de um único saber”. Converência Lusíada, 31(43), 92–111. https://doi.org/10.37508/rcl.2020.n43a370

Issue

Vol. 31 No. 43 (2020): Racism in Portuguese: an interdisciplinary outlook

Section

DOSSIER

License

Authors who publish in Convergência Lusíada agree with the following terms:

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors may enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
  3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.

Licença Creative Commons
Revista Convergência Lusíada is licensed under a Creative Commons - Atribuição-NãoComercial 4.0 Internacional.