Literatures in transit: displacements between Goa, Macao and Portugal in literary works written in Portuguese(1951-1975)

• Grant number: 14/00829-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: August 01, 2014
• End date: July 31, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Other Vernacular Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Helder Garmes
• Grantee: Duarte Nuno Drumond Braga
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 14/15657-8 - Thinking Goa - a singular archive in Portuguese, AP.TEM
• Associated scholarship(s): 17/22008-4 - Journalism and the origins of Macau poetry in Portuguese (1863-1930), BE.EP.PD

Abstract

Goa and Macao, the two former Portuguese colonies in Asia, still retain marks of the colonial administration under which they were interconnected. The literary aspect of this relation is a dimension not yet sufficiently studied, especially from a comparative point of view, in Lusophone writing. This project proposes readings of this literary relation in the temporal scope of the Portuguese Empire's final period (1951-1975). Our working hypothesis focuses on displacement - involving the imagery of travel, exile or Diaspora - thematized in Goan and Macanese literary works of that period, as well as in some correlate Portuguese literary works. This imagery allows us to reconsider those literatures' own and sometimes uncertain status, as well as their peripheral nature, assuming that these elements are internally featured in the texts as an implicit or explicit interrogation on the nature of such literatures. This research will focus on the reconstruction of bio-bibliographical paths of writers in transit from the two territories, or in passing through them, in the case of the Portuguese. In order to do so it will be based on a preliminary survey of literary works in Brazilian institutions. Following a comparative focus, the images of displacement, will be studied, as a theme, a lyrical motif or a narrative axis in the corpus thus defined by archival research. We intend to prove that the mobility expressed by these works offers a safe margin for its comparison and provides new data to map convergences and points of departure among these peripheral literary spaces and in their contact with the Portuguese literature.