Conclusion

Summary

The texts explored in this volume emerge from different colonial experiences spanning the last century and enunciate particular moments in the reproduction of Empire. More importantly, they offer valuable and nuanced contestations to Empire and propose decolonial alternatives to imperial subjectivity, historicization, and knowledge.

While the experiences laid out in these literary products – and behind their creation – contribute to the study of Lusophone literatures, they also tackle larger questions beyond geo-linguistic categories of cultural production. The writers studied here offer robust new inquiries into Empire not only as a system of economic and political power, but also and especially as a field of meaning, economy of desire, and mode of epistemological domination. This does not mean that these works have little to offer to the study of Portuguese colonialism and its particular legacies. Rather, they offer approaches to that history through its interaction with, and contribution to, the larger field of Empire. At a historical moment when imperial categories of time, space, and bodies undergirding Empire continue to be reinforced, not least with the rise of right-wing white nationalism in Europe and the Americas, decolonial perspectives on intersubjective existence have become increasingly urgent. In this respect, each work or writer offers a different perspective and blueprint for deconstructing and moving beyond Empire.

Mário and Oswald de Andrade articulated and interrogated the Brazilian postcolony a hundred years after Brazilian political independence and roughly a hundred and fifteen years after the formal decolonization of Latin America. The moment was arguably propitious for a critical rereading of the imperial historicization of (post)colonial Brazil and a theorization of how to break with imperial signification and knowledge. As a long-time Timorese exile in Portugal during the final decades of Portugal's imperial project, Fernando Sylvan's poetry and political/cultural essays toe the line between anti-colonial discourse and a celebration of the state-backed narrative of Portugal as a transcontinental and multiracial nation. In doing so, Sylvan's work has lent poetic expression to the plight of East Timor against different imperial forces while also inserting such an anti-imperial struggle into transnational frameworks of decoloniality. Through his literary œuvre, Luís Cardoso has furthered this transborder approach to decoloniality in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century while imagining, through his assortment of characters, decolonial significations of bodies and spaces.