Romance de Retornados (Returned novel): the Empire Portuguese revisted

• Grant number: 15/11388-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: September 05, 2015
• End date: March 04, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Other Vernacular Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Tania Celestino de Macedo
• Grantee: Tania Celestino de Macedo
• Host Investigator: Maria Manuela Martins Ribeiro Sanches
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal

Abstract

The research proprosal, which is established in the intersection field between Literature and History and already in progress (from effected (taken) readings and research in libraries and in the Internet), intends to verify how in a crisis situation as faced by Portugal today, there are articulated artistic speeches that look to understand, to justify and / or to exceed the moment. To answer this aim, our attention was focused on the literary phenomenon called "romances de retornados" (Retorned Novel), as well as in other Portuguese media products - television series and and radio broadcast - on these same individuals returned from Africa). As we understand, these products, that there became a huge success of public, they look for answers to the present´s disasters with a ("saudosista") missing look to a recent past situated in the end of the 1970 years. From the stories about the settlers who returned to Portugal after the independences of the African Portuguese-speaking countries and it had to rebuild his lives in Europe, is fabled the return of an Imperial Portugal that, betrayed you shear by the African independences (and by the left), it was obliged to boxed-up itself with the belongings of the settlers brought back to the ancient metropolis. Thus, "betrayed", however not forgotten, the ghost of the Portuguese Colonial Empire, in the moment of crisis of the country, it will insinuate in the speeches that evoke the courage and the competence of the old settlers in Africa that could "give new world to the world". They would be, so, which would present better credentials to retake "the splendor of Portugal". From a corpus initially composed of 15 novels that focus the "retornados" of Angola, and similar media objects, we will we will think over the tensions that go through these products, having in mind the persistence of colonial speeches in a situation of absence of the Colonial Empire. Having with reference to the Postcolonial studies, those narratives will be confronted to the texts of the Angolan writers Boaventura Cardoso, Fragata de Morais and Manuel Rui. (AU)