Anti-Empire: Decolonial Interventions in Lusophone Literatures: (18 Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures)

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched. Anti-Empire explores how different writers across Lusophone spaces have engaged with imperial and colonial power at its various levels of domination, while imagining alternatives to dominant discourses pertaining to race, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexuality, and class. Guided by a theoretically eclectic approach ranging from Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, Postcolonial Theory, Queer Theory, and Critical Race Studies, Empire is explored as a spectrum of contemporary global power inaugurated by European expansion and propagated in the postcolonial present through economic, cultural, and political forces. Through the texts analysed, Anti-Empire offers in-depth interrogations of contemporary power in terms of racial politics, gender performance, socio-economic divisions, political structures, and the intersections of these facets of domination and hegemony. By way of grappling with Empire’s discursive field and charting new modes of producing meaning in opposition to that of Empire, the texts read from Brazil, Cabo Verde, East Timor, Portugal, and São Tomé and Príncipe open new inquiries for Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies while contributing theoretical debates to the study of Lusophone cultures.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Decolonizing Consumption and Postcoloniality: a Theory of Allegory in Oswald de Andrade’s Antropofagia 2. Mário de Andrade’s Antropofagia and Macunaíma as Anti-Imperial Scene of Writing 3. Toward a Multicultural Ethics and Decolonial Meta-Identity in the Work of Fernando Sylvan 4. Untranslatable Subalternity and Historicizing Empire’s Enjoyment in Luís Cardoso’s Requiem para o Navegador Solitário 5. Imperial Cryptonomy: Colonial Specters and Portuguese Exceptionalism in Isabela Figueiredo’s Caderno de Memórias Coloniais 6. Spectrality as Decolonial Narrative Device for Colonial Experience in António Lobo Antunes’s O Esplendor de Portugal 7. Decolonizing Hybridity through Intersectionality and Diaspora in the Poetry of Olinda Beja 8. Transgendering Jesus: Mário Lúcio’s O Novíssimo Testamento and the Dismantling of Imperial Categories Conclusion Bibliography

About the Author :
Daniel F. Silva is Associate Professor of Luso-Hispanic Studies, Director of Black Studies, and Director of the Twilight Project at Middlebury College.

Review :
Reviews 'Prof. Silva’s manuscript will fill an important gap in Lusophone and postcolonial studies. It is an original study that groups together an important group of texts and discusses them in relation to their critical positionality regarding colonialism and coloniality.' Antonio Luciano de Andrade Tosta, The University of Kansas ‘This study is extremely relevant and of interest for anyone who researches about Lusophone countries literature and their political and historical contexts, as well as decolonial forms of knowledge. The book is enlightening, easy to understand and presented in a logical manner. In addition, it certainly provides an important contribution to the field of Lusophone studies and their post-colonial historical, cultural and economic issues.' Débora Zamorano, Hispania