Mia Couto: Representation and subalternity in Women of Ashes

  • José Paulo Cruz Pereira Universidade do Algarve
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37508/rcl.2021.n45a426
Keywords: Representation, Subalternity, Heterogeneity, suspension, neuter, to bear witness

Abstract

My reading focus on: a) the representation of subalternity in Women of Ashes; b) the semantic, as well as political and ethical implications of the complex process of the narrator’s voice and name – the narrative voice that crosses the entire plot that intersects all the three different novels of The Sands of the Emperor. It starts, for that purpose, by pondering the twofold meaning of ‘representation’, in Can the Subaltern Speak?, by Gayatri C. Spivak, examining: a) the intersection of both Karl Marx’s 18th of Brumair of Louis Bonaparte and Antonio Gramsci’s The Southern Question, in her description of the concept of the subaltern; b) the way it is possible to project the characteristic features of the subaltern as an excluded subject in Women of Ashes. It performs this by uncovering both the instance of the neuter as Blanchot defines it – in L’entretien infinit – and the instance of singularity, as Spivak also unfolds it, in An Aesthetic Eductation in the Era of Globalization – reading them in one of the fables with which Mia Couto allegorizes them.

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Author Biography

José Paulo Cruz Pereira, Universidade do Algarve

José Paulo Cruz Pereira nasceu na Ilha de Moçambique. Licenciou-se em Línguas e Literaturas Modernas pela Universidade Clássica de Lisboa, onde defendeu, em 1996, uma 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, também em Literatura Comparada, pela Universidade do Algarve, onde leciona as disciplinas de 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 investiga, como membro do grupo 7 do Centro de Literaturas e Culturas Lusófonas e Europeias.

References

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BLANCHOT, Maurice. La voix narrative (le ‘il’, le neuter). L’entretien infinit. Paris: Gallimard, 1969a, pp. 556-567.

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SPIVAK, Gayatri C. Quem Reivindica a Alteridade? Trad. de Patricia Silveira de Farias. In HOLLANDA, Heloísa Buarque de. Tendências e Impasses: o feminismo como crítica da cultura. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1994, pp. 187-205.

SPIVAK, Gayatri C. Mapping the present: interview with Gayatri Spivak. New Formations - 45: The Rendez-vous of Conquest (Winter), 2001, pp. 9-23.

SPIVAK, Gayatri C. Can the Subaltern Speak? In MORRIS, Rosalind C. (ed.) Can the Subaltern Speak? –Reflections on the History of an Idea. New York: Columbia UP, 2010, pp. 21-78.

SPIVAK, Gayatri C. Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular. Na Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge / Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 2013, pp. 429-442.

Published
2021-06-30
How to Cite
Cruz Pereira, J. P. (2021). Mia Couto: Representation and subalternity in Women of Ashes. Converência Lusíada, 32(45), 32-63. https://doi.org/10.37508/rcl.2021.n45a426
Issue
Vol. 32 No. 45 (2021): Family Structures and Subalternities
Section
DOSSIER

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