Imagined Geographies in Portuguese and Lusophone-African Literature: Narratives of Discovery and Empire (review)

Luís Madureira’s Imaginary Geographies in Portuguese and Lusophone-African Literature: Narratives of Discovery and Empire is truly a landmark in our field, radically changing the coordinates through which we should read the narratives of Portugal and Mozambique. Madureira’s singular skill stems from an immense erudition and the ease with which he interprets a range of texts from every age and place of world literature – a true testament to his brilliant training in comparative literature. His aptitude for reading the specificities of the Portuguese imperial experience and legacy, without plunging into the banalities of essentialism or exceptionalism, is another characteristic that recommends his latest monograph. Perhaps his greatest contribution is the gift he has to see connections between times and texts – for example between Mendes Pinto and Mia Couto – in a volume that gives original and potent readings involving Lobo Antunes, Saramago, Columbus, Lídia Jorge, Camões, Fernando Pessoa, Gilberto Freyre, and Manuel Rui, among many others.

The work is essential reading alongside Margarida Calafate Ribeiro’s Uma História de Regressos: Império, Guerra Colonial e Pós-colonialismo (Porto: Afrontamento, 2004) for anyone with a serious interest in the undecidability and intellectual incoherence yet sophistry of the Portuguese imperial project and its cultural aftermath. Where Calafate Ribeiro sees a history of flawed returns, Madureira, drawing on many of the same literary sources, points to the essentially lost nature – from its very inception – of the Portuguese colonial object. What Helder Macedo sees, in Camões’s epic, as the imperial enteprise’s end inscribed from its beginning (Partes de África), Madureira refines to reflect on the peculiar timelessness of the whole operation – an endeavour peculiarly out-of-joint at its beginning, middle, end and during its postimperial encore. Madureira is at his strongest as he weaves postcolonial, psychoanalytical and critical theory seamlessly into a profound and personal knowledge of the dying days of a colonialism whose residue still impregnates Portuguese culture with the scent of sixteenth-century imperial failings.

Imaginary Geographies is divided into an introduction, three chapters, each subdivided into a number of sections, and a preface, written by Phyllis Peres. The first chapter deals with the cultural discourses surrounding the Portuguese “discoveries,” particularly of the east, and is, to date, the most thorough and important contribution to studies on the peculiarities of Portuguese Orientalism, to borrow and anachronistically appropriate Said’s deployment of the term. The chapter fits beautifully into one of the book’s central arguments – an argument that applies equally to the Portuguese literary responses to the struggles for independence in the African colonies (the second chapter) and to the idiosyncratic nationalist project of the Mozambican writer Mia Couto (the third chapter). The argument is that there is, and for a long time has been, both in Portugal and in the residues of its overseas empire, a longing desire “for admittance into History,” a struggle repeatedly registered as “an absence of the historical” (5). Madureira’s study demonstrates the subtle nuances of this cancellation of historicity, even at the moments when Portugal was “discovering” the east – when it arguably inscribed itself into the greatest Western historical narrative of all time. Crucial to understanding the subtlety of Madureira’s argument is, to return to Helder Macedo’s metaphor, a realization that when Portugal was at its most innovative, it was always already marked by an “imperial belatedness” (5) (Macedo’s imperial end inscribed in its beginning). Indeed, the originality of Portugal’s imperial beginnings – the inauguration of a global trading system – was, it could be argued, little more than a plagiarizing of preexisting Muslim and Oriental commercial networks subsequently passed off as a lusophone opening up of the globe. Madureira captures the sense of insecurity inherent in the cultural manifestations and aftermaths of a project that could not take its own origins too seriously, given the refracted simulation that marked its own base...