WRITTEN AND VISUAL NARRATIVES OF THE POSTCOLONIAL NATION PROJECT CESA/FCT    PTDC/CPC-ELT/4939/2012

The aim of the first line of research is to broaden the scope of research from the nations of Angola and Mozambique to Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Principe and Guinea-Bissau; that is, to produce a new set of essays on the representation of the Nation in the narrative of these Portuguese-speaking African countries, and to conduct interviews with writers and intellectuals from these countries, with the aim of completing the study of postcolonial nation and narration in the context of Portuguese-speaking African states. This approach will allow a comparative analysis of the representation of the nation in all Portuguese-speaking African countries.

The second line of the research, complementary to the first one, proposes a new focus on the representation of the nation in cinematographic narratives in the Portuguese-speaking African countries and thus widens the scope of research on the representation of the nation in literary texts to encompass the field of cinema.

The aim of the proposed project, Written and Visual Narratives of the Postcolonial Nation, is to study how the literary and cinematographic narratives of Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Principe and Guinea-Bissau create a suitable environment for the construction of imagined communities and the projection of new identities.

Our goal is to question the role of narrative -  in its different forms, such as novel, short story, film, documentary - as well as of the parallel para-textual production - this is, the interviews with writers and film-makers - in the construction and deconstruction of such notions as nation, ethnicity, diaspora, migration and trans-nationality, which are crucial concepts for forging and disentangling identities. We make use of the most adequate theorical framework avaliable from the field of postcolonial studies in order to support our analysis. The project Written and Visual Narratives of the Postcolonial Nation will explore three topics that are relevant for the representations of the nation: A) Images/Motifs of History and Memory of the colonial and pre-colonial periods and their role in a postcolonial reconstruction and re-reading of the historical and mythical past. B) Images/Motifs of Location and Dislocation: Travel and Diaspora and their role in describing different ethno-landscapes, which provoke movements between center and periphery, the urban and the rural, and local and global spaces that stimulate the emergence of plural identity configurations. C) Discursive Strategies: Genres/Canons that interrogate and reflect the heritage and transformation of (literary and visual) narrative practices as they are diversified and reconfigured in tandem with changing figurations of nation and identity.