Will Laughter Bury the Empire? Discursive Strategies in Portuguese Post-Imperial Literature

Abstract

Can the post-April 25th Portuguese literature be faced as a post-imperial literature as well? Meaning, can it be faced as a literature that not only comes after the end of the Empire, but also as one that reacts critically to that end by means of numerous rhetorical and ideological strategies? Our idea stems from the realization that, in the end of the 20th century and in the first two decades of 21st, both in Portuguese prose and poetry, there is a constellation of works that make use of the broad spectrum of the comic vein (irony, satire, farce) in order to face the ghosts and the ghostliness that still haunt the present days of the Portuguese and their complex relation to the country’s colonial past. Our critical exercise aims at privileging part of the works by two contemporary Portuguese authors (albeit from different generations): the poet and medical doctor Jorge de Sousa Braga (1957), who can be identified with the 1980s generation of Portuguese poetry, and the poet and essayist Patrícia Lino (1990), whose Kit de Sobrevivência do Descobridor Português no Mundo Anticolonial (“The Portuguese Discoverer’s Survival Kit in the Anticolonial World”, in loose terms) has just been published in 2020.