Resumo

This seminar will address the issue of  the (in)visibility of Lusophone African literatures in the traditional system of World Literature  and the need to re-conceptualize the concept of World Literature  through other global systems (Wallerstein) and from considerations of the so-called “minor” literatures (Deleuze/Guattari). As a starting point I want to use part of a recently published paper (“Blindness, Invisibility, and the Negative Inheritance of World Literature”. Modern Language Quarterly, 74.2 (2013), (277-292), as well as advance more explicitly on specific points of several cases (Mia Couto, Pepetela) also taking into account the notion of triangular relations (Paul Gilroy) and the possible importance of African literatures for a theoretical reconceptualization of post-colonial concepts. 

Bio note

Paulo de Medeiros is Full Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick. In 2011-2012 was Keeley Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford University. Medeiros has been a visiting professor at several universities in Portugal, Brazil, Spain and the UK. Honorary Fellow of the Modern Language Institute School of Advanced Studies, University of London. His research focuses on Portuguese-Brazilian narrative in literary and cultural theory with emphasis on the relationship between literature and politics, as well as in post-colonial issues. Paulo de Medeiros organized the series Postcolonial Theory and Lusophone Literatures (Utrecht, 2007), and co-organized several thematic numbers of journals of which the latest is Journal of Romance Studies on Psychoanalysis and Portuguese Studies (2011). In 2013 he published Pessoa's Geometry of the Abyss: Modernity and the Book of Disquiet (Legenda) and is currently preparing a study on Post-Imperial Europe.