World-Literature, Post-Memory and Post-Colonial Resistances in "O Canto da Moreia" (2019) by Luísa Semedo and "As Novas Identidades Portuguesas" (2020) by Patrícia Moreira

• Autor(a) principal: Rendeiro, Margarida
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://revistadeletras.utad.pt/index.php/revistadeletras/article/view/300

This article discusses Luísa Semedo’s O Canto da Moreia (2019) and Patrícia Moreira’s As Novas Identidades Portuguesas (2020) as expressions of world-literature, a term this article draws from the work published by the Warwick Collective Research in 2015. O Canto da Moreia and As Novas Identidades Portuguesas are two narratives that convey intersectional gazes into the diasporic Cape-Verdean communities in a Portuguese society that is not yet reconciled with its postcolonial legacy. It is argued that, in both narratives, the literary aesthetic emerges as resistance to the patriarchal, neoliberal and neocolonial model that has shaped the development of postcolonial Portuguese modernity and dehumanized people of colour, similarly to what happens in the other European postcolonial societies. By giving protagonism to racialized voices, historically absent in Portuguese literature, these narratives show that the overcoming of silences on the colonial past can act as a historical reparation, depending on whether these voices are given the possibility of evolving as historical subjects and agents of their own destiny. This emerges as an ultimate form of collective resistance that repairs postcolonial identitarian dynamics.