Journal articles on the topic 'African literature (Portuguese) - History and criticism'

Resumo: Com a publicação do romance intitulado A noite das mulheres cantoras, em 2011, Lídia Jorge lança-se a perscrutar o efêmero cenário da música pop numa trama envolvente, a qual não somente aponta para importantes aspectos da vida cultural portuguesa, mas também demonstra certa ousadia autoral em transformar em matéria literária os meandros do espetáculo midiático e suas contradições. Pelas palavras da escritora, “na história de um bando conta-se sempre a história de um povo”, logo, o quinteto vocal entregar-se-á de modo fáustico não a uma grande causa, mas à busca desmesurada pelo estrelato, diante do qual parece não importar valores éticos, estéticos e ideológicos a expor, pois, seus corpos a uma inevitável violência não apenas simbólica. Se as aptidões artísticas unem as personagens nesse peculiar microcosmo que certamente privilegia o universo feminino, o fato de pertencerem a famílias de retornados amplia a mensagem que subjaz à narrativa: a derrocada do império português em África e a retomada da democracia. Portanto, antigos fados ou os célebres versos de “Uma casa portuguesa” ficarão para trás ante o ritmo frenético dos novos tempos. Ora, é Portugal mais perto do chamado mundo globalizado e a distanciar-se da longa noite salazarista. Enfim, este pequeno estudo terá como aporte teórico, entre outros, as reflexões de Eduardo Lourenço, Roland Barthes e Guy Debord e servirão para o cotejo do referido romance, cuja crítica parece apresentar lacunas, não obstante a vigorosa letra de uma das mais consagradas escritoras da literatura portuguesa.Palavras-chave: Lídia Jorge; literatura portuguesa; romance português contemporâneo; literatura de autoria feminina; sociedade do espetáculo.Abstract: With the publication of the novel entitled The night of the singing women, in 2011, Lídia Jorge looks closely at the ephemeral scene of the pop music in an engaging plot, which not only points to important aspects of Portuguese cultural life, but it also demonstrates a certain authorial boldness in turning into literary matters the intricacies of the media spectacle and its contradictions. In the words of the writer, “in the history of a band one always tells the story of a people”, so to achieve fame, the vocal quintet will not care about ethical, aesthetic and ideological values that will expose their bodies to unavoidable violence that is not just symbolic. If artistic skills unite the characters in this peculiar microcosm, which certainly favors the female universe, the condition of belonging to returnee families expands the message that underlies the narrative: the collapse of the Portuguese empire in Africa and the resumption of democracy. So old fados or the famous verses of “A Portuguese Home” will be left behind in the frenetic pace of the new times. Now Portugal is closer to the so-called globalized world and moving away from the long Salazar night. Finally, this small study will have as theoretical support, among others, the reflections of Eduardo Lourenço, Roland Barthes and Guy Debord will serve for the analysis of this novel, whose criticism seems to have gaps, despite the vigorous writing of one of the most famous writers of Portuguese literature.Keywords: Lídia Jorge; Portuguese literature; contemporary Portuguese novel; female authored literature; society of the spectacle.

This paper presents an evaluation of five translations into Brazilian Portuguese of the poem “Still I Rise” by African-American author Maya Angelou (1928-2014). Also, I present and discuss my own translation of the same poem, in which I aimed at creating a text to be performed, i.e. that would work orally in Portuguese. The reasons behind this choice are: 1) this is one of Angelou’s most famous poems and one which she performed on many occasions; 2) Angelou’s poetry stands out for following the African-American tradition of oral literature and so the poem acquires a new aesthetical dimension when it is performed. My criticism on the translations as well as my translation are in debt to Paulo Henriques Britto’s work towards a more objective evaluation of poetic translations (2002).

From the independence of Brazil in 1822 down to the independence of the African colonies in 1975, successive Portuguese governments became engaged in maintaining, enlarging, developing and, ultimately, in defending an empire in Africa. The literature on the Portuguese African empire is largely concerned with discussing the economic and political motives behind imperial policy1. Thus, the evaluation of the costs and benefits of the empire for the metropolitan economy —or, for that matter, the colonial economies— has not received much attention. This paper attempts to provide some of the evidence necessary to conduct such an evaluation2.

Peter Mark's “Portuguese” Style is a welcome contribution to the growing literature on the history and development of Atlantic world cultures. In particular, Mark examines the evolution and proliferation of “Portuguese”-style domestic architecture, primarily in Senegambia, but also in other parts of the Portuguese colonial world, including Cape Verde and Brazil. For Mark, “Portuguese”-style is an amalgamation of Jola and Manding architectural forms, and to a lesser extent, those of the Portuguese. This architectural style—sun-dried brick houses, rectangular in shape, with whitewashed walls, and a continuous veranda or vestibule at the entry—was most closely associated with Luso-Africans working as middlemen in the trade between the African interior and Portuguese traders on the coast.

The article aims at searching for the correlation between the Luso-African identity, understood as a form of cultural identity based on the concept of Lusophony, and The Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP), an international organisation that brings together countries whose official language is Portuguese. The CPLP is considered as an institutional emanation of the idea of Lusophony. However, for almost 25 years since its creation it still receives a lot of criticism. Despite the multiplicity of initiatives that it proposed, for a long time it seemed that the CPLP did not really move beyond the concept phase. Furthermore, until recently the organisation has focused mainly on cultural and political cooperation, leaving behind its enormous economic possibilities and provoking questions about an untapped potential of the CPLP. The paper attempts to reflect on the hypothesis that the limited capacities of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries regarding the African continent are, at least partially, related to the problem with Luso-African identity. The considerations presented in the article are based on the critical reading of the literature of the subject, qualitative analysis of the already existing data (official documents and the press, available statistics), as well as the author’s reflections drawn from observations, interviews and informal talks conducted during field research in Mozambique (2015) and Guinea-Bissau (2016), along with multiple study visits to Portugal (2011-2016), while realizing the research project devoted to the problem of state dysfunctionality in the Lusophone Africa.

The history of Indian shipbuilding is a relatively well-studied topic. There are two strands of literature on Indian shipping. First there is the Indian: R.N. Mukherjee (1923) is, in spite of some minor criticism which could be levelled at it, still the basic work on the topic. Among the more recent contributions should be mentioned those of L. Gopal and J. Qaisar. The second strand is Portuguese. Much of the Portuguese work on ‘Portuguese’ shipbuilding in the sixteenth century deals with shipbuilding in Goa. Now, was this ‘Portuguese’ shipbuilding or ‘Indian’ shipbuilding? ‘European’ and ‘Indian’ technology were so closely interlinked on the west coast of India that it is impossible to make a clear distinction. The seminal contributions on this topic are the already very well-established works of Commodore Quirinho da Fonsequa and of Frazāo de Vasconselhos. Their articles, which have appeared in several Portuguese journals, very much deserve an English translation. More recently the important work by A. Marques Esparteiro on the ships used in the carreira da Índia has appeared.

Historical studies of nature conservation and literary criticism of fiction concerned with the natural environment provide some pointers for the study of South African children’s literature in English. This kind of literature, in turn, has a contribution to make to studies of South African social history and literature. There are English-language stories, poems and picture books for children which reflect human interaction with nature in South Africa since early in the nineteenth century: from hunting, through domestication of the wilds, the development of scientific agriculture, and the changing roles of nature reserves, to modern ecological concern for the entire environment. Until late in the twentieth century the literature usually endorsed the assumption held by whites that they had exclusive ownership of the land and wildlife. In recent years English-language children’s writers and translators of indigenous folktales for children have begun to explore traditional beliefs about and practices in conservation.

Abstract:In Mozambique and Cape Verde, writing in Portuguese by African women has directly engaged political reconstruction by denouncing colonial oppression and embracing national freedom. This article addresses the recent history of Lusophone African women's fiction, which has been pivotal in inscribing the intimate arena of sexuality and motherhood into power relations and has also revealed ways in which the domain of violence intersects with private lives. By focusing on two novels that exemplify this trend, this article demonstrates links between the political and the intimate. It also shows how Lusophone African authors contribute to healing social conflict through their narratives, and draws some conclusions about gender relations in the Lusophone African experience and across the continent.

Reverend Father Professor Amechi Nicholas Akwanya is one of the towering scholars of literature in Nigeria and elsewhere in the world. For decades, and still counting, Fr. Prof. Akwanya has worked arduously, professing literature by way of teaching, researching, and writing in the Department of English and Literary Studies of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. To his credit, therefore, this genius of a literature scholar has singularly authored over 70 articles, six critically engaging books, a novel, and three volumes of poetry. His PhD thesis, Structuring and Meaning in the Nigerian Novel, which he completed in 1989, is a staggering 734-page document. Professor Akwanya has also taught many literature courses, namely: European Continental Literature, Studies in Drama, Modern Literary Theory, African Poetry, History of Theatre: Aeschylus to Shakespeare, European Theatre since Ibsen, English Literature Survey: the Beginnings, Semantics, History of the English Language, History of Criticism, Modern Discourse Analysis, Greek and Roman Literatures, Linguistics and the Teaching of Literature, Major Strands in Literary Criticism, Issues in Comparative Literature, Discourse Theory, English Poetry, English Drama, Modern British Literature, Comparative Studies in Poetry, Comparative Studies in Drama, Studies in African Drama, and Philosophy of Literature. A Fellow of Nigerian Academy of Letters, Akwanya’s open access works have been read over 109,478 times around the world. In this wide-ranging interview, he speaks to Andrew Bula, a young lecturer from Baze University, Abuja, shedding light on a variety of issues around which his life revolves.

Due to her geographical position, the African continent has for many centuries hosted visitors from other continents such as Asia and Europe. Such visitors came to Africa as explorers, missionaries, traders and colonialists. Over the years, the continent has played host to the Chinese, Portuguese, Persians, Indians, Arabs and Europeans. Arabs have had a particularly long history of interaction with East African people, and have therefore made a significant contribution to the development of the Swahili language. Swahili is an African native language of Bantu origin which had been in existence before the arrival of Arabs in East Africa. The long period of interaction between Arabs and the locals led to linguistic borrowing mainly from Arabic to Swahili. The presence of loanwords in Swahili is evidence of cultural interaction between the Swahili and Arabic people. The Arabic words are borrowed from diverse registers of the language. Hence, Swahili literature is loaded with Arabic cultural aspects through Arabic loanwords. Many literary works are examples of Swahili literature that contains such words. As a result, there is evidence of Swahili integrating Arabic culture in its literature, an aspect that this paper seeks to highlight.

This essay brings together two methods of cultural‐literary analysis that have yet to be fully integrated: distant reading and the critique of race and racial difference. It constructs a reflexive and critical version of distant reading—one attuned to the arguments and methods of critical race studies—while still providing data‐driven insights useful to the writing of literary history and criticism, especially to the history and criticism of postwar African American fiction, in particular James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. Because race is socially constructed, it poses unique challenges for a computational analysis of race and writing. Any version of distant reading that addresses race will require a dialectical approach. (RJS and ER)

On November 1, 2020 Lomonosov Moscow State University welcomed the participants of Camões Readings for the seventh time – now via video conference. The biennial event was devoted to the history of Portugal, Brazil and the countries of the Portuguese-speaking Africa, political, cultural and social processes taking place in these regions, literature heritage of the authors who wrote in Portuguese and the aspects of the Portuguese linguistics. The event, organized by the MSU Faculty of Philology, saw participants, scholars and researches from such institutions as the Russian Foreign Ministry, the Embassy of Brazil in Moscow, five institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Institute of Latin American Studies, Institute of World History, Institute of Linguistics, Gorki Institute of World Literature and Institute for African Studies), MGIMO University, Moscow State Linguistic University, Russian State University for the Humanities, Saint Petersburg State University and the Military University of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. Foreign speakers from Instituto Camões, Portugal, Université de Provence Aix-Marseille I, France, and other organisations also took part. The contemporary situation in the bilateral Russia‒Brazil dialogue, national and linguistic identity of the Portuguese-speaking regions, linguistic usages, the polyglottism‒ multilinguism dynamics and other topics of high interest were discussed. Among the thirty presentations several were dedicated to the historic landmark of the 45th anniversary of the independence of Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe. The conference concluded with common decision to hold such meetings once a year.

On November 1, 2020 Lomonosov Moscow State University welcomed the participants of Camões Readings for the seventh time – now via video conference. The biennial event was devoted to the history of Portugal, Brazil and the countries of the Portuguese-speaking Africa, political, cultural and social processes taking place in these regions, literature heritage of the authors who wrote in Portuguese and the aspects of the Portuguese linguistics. The event, organized by the MSU Faculty of Philology, saw participants, scholars and researches from such institutions as the Russian Foreign Ministry, the Embassy of Brazil in Moscow, five institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Institute of Latin American Studies, Institute of World History, Institute of Linguistics, Gorki Institute of World Literature and Institute for African Studies), MGIMO University, Moscow State Linguistic University, Russian State University for the Humanities, Saint Petersburg State University and the Military University of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. Foreign speakers from Instituto Camões, Portugal, Université de Provence Aix-Marseille I, France, and other organisations also took part. The contemporary situation in the bilateral Russia‒Brazil dialogue, national and linguistic identity of the Portuguese-speaking regions, linguistic usages, the polyglottism‒ multilinguism dynamics and other topics of high interest were discussed. Among the thirty presentations several were dedicated to the historic landmark of the 45th anniversary of the independence of Angola, Mozambique, Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe. The conference concluded with common decision to hold such meetings once a year.

J. Saunders Redding's To Make a Poet Black (1939) changed the way African American poetry would be read and valued. In an effort to articulate an African American modernism, Redding rewrote the recent history of the New Negro Renaissance, validating and skewing its literary production. The standards and values that Redding used helped to advance the reputations of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer but also led to discrimination against femininity and its associated poetic forms. By incorporating the gendered matrix of the New Criticism into African American literary studies, he helped to create a new formal consensus, which cut across the black and the white academies and united critics on the left and the right of the ideological spectrum, in opposition to women's poetry.

Between 1440 and 1640, from 300,000 to 350,000 African slaves were forcefully moved from sub-Saharan Africa to the Iberic Peninsula. Mostly female and young, this population was led to Portugal, to live among different cultural practices-in a society where the smallest religious, ethnic, or cultural difference was a cause of exclusion. How did men and women of foreign origins and cultures share a life, and have children, with the Portuguese, without sharing the society's values? Through exclusion, integration, and assimilation, the African presence in Portugal, from the sixteenth century onwards, created a plural nation and complex identities.

Abstract The way in which the history of colonialism might link up with the formation of postcolonial migrant identities remains insufficiently examined. Through a comparison between transnational business practices of Khoja Ismaili Muslim settled in the British and Portuguese colonial territories of East Africa and in contemporary Angola, the present paper aims to discuss the impact of colonial experiences in the configuration of postcolonial business cultures. Articulating several guiding empirical questions, we will attempt to show that the continuing centrality of the nation-states in which Ismaili transnational economic activities are embedded, the notion of a disadvantageous network closure, concomitant with the importance of face-to-face contacts, the mutual trust and understanding sustained through personal relations, and the tendency for national loyalty to prevail over religious belonging (whenever any potential conflict between the two exists) constitute crucial dimensions of an accumulated colonial knowledge which is significant in the analysis of the Ismaili competitive advantage in postcolonial Africa. This argument will be developed on the basis of a multi-sited ethnographic research. The U.K. and Portugal emerged as a strategic passage for our encounters with East African Ismailis from former British and Portuguese colonial territories. The current Angolan context, absent from the available literature, was selected as a postcolonial term of comparison.

This interdisciplinary essay analyzes John Dos Passos’s travel book Rosinante to the Road Again (1922) from a Jamesonian perspective, focusing on the implicit dialectical interaction between creativity and the totality of history, the role of the modernist utopian illusion and the quest for return to an Edenic past, the cosmopolitan expatriate individual as a fundamental part of a historical context, and the implications of the literary form in relation to a concrete textual tradition or movement. For this purpose, the analysis draws on Jameson’s The Modernist Papers and The Political Unconscious to establish a dialectical criticism that investigates how the literary form is engaged with a material historical situation. Therefore, the Spanish socio-historical reality depicted in Rosinante becomes a symbol of Dos Passos’s search for the return to the mythic Arcadia. In his transcultural and transnational quest for the Spanish gesture, Dos Passos was searching how to define his own unstable hybrid modernist identity in the context of Spanish history and literature. As a result, Rosinante becomes a sort of paradigmatic modernist epic in which the American writer experiments with the literary motif of the journey as a form of self-exploration. His temporary expatriate condition, and the reality of being an American with Portuguese roots, determined his need for a more Edenic and epic culture far from the limitations of the American urban industrialization and materialism.

Throughout the twentieth century, as literary texts circulated through high-school and college classrooms, reading became a specialized skill. Especially with the dominance of the “new criticism” in the 1930s, literature acquired an autonomous life as “text,” demanding intensive “close reading” of its verbal complexity and formal coherence as an aesthetic object. Beginning in the 1970s, with the proliferation of programs devoted to African-American culture, gender studies, sexuality studies, and ethnic studies programs, the literary canon became more diverse. In the mid-1980s new historicism helped push aesthetic formalism further from the agenda of literary education in the university, promoting new interest in historical contexts even as psychoanalytic, deconstructive, and reader-response approaches continued to fetishize “textuality” as their primary object of inquiry. Whatever the vagaries of theory, method, and subdisciplinary turf battles through which scholars have wandered over the last few decades, we have remained in our professional practices of reading and teaching committed to a hermeneutics of interpretation. Even as scholars developed arguments about history or culture, the teaching and criticism of literature has continued to rely on the institutional and psychological isolation of reading, as an individual exercise in mastery of the text fostered by silence and solitude.

AbstractThis essay argues for reading a discredited slave narrative—the Narrative of James Williams (1838)—as an early black novel. Reading this narrative as a founding black novel à la Robinson Crusoe complicates the genealogy and theoretical parameters of literary criticism about early US black fiction. Such a reading revises accounts about the emergence of the third-person fictive voice inaugurated by Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown in the 1850s. It also offers a new understanding of the antislavery movement’s quest for authenticity. More importantly, reading NJW as novelistic fiction illustrates how a fugitive slave might narrativize muddied textual politics and effectively challenge the reparative vision with which we theorize the genres and politics of early African American literary texts.

This paper deals with some of the sociological implications of a major cultural high-water point in the African American experience, the New Negro/Harlem Renaissance. The paper concentrates on the cultural transformations brought about through the intellectual activity of political activists, a multi-genre group of artists, cultural brokers, and businesspersons. The driving-wheel thrust of this era was the reclamation and the invigoration of the traditions of the culture with an emphasis on both the, African and the American aspects, which significantly impacted American and international culture then and throughout the 20th century. This study examines the pre-1920s background, the forms of Black activism during the Renaissance, the modern content of the writers' work, and the enthusiasm of whites for the African American art forms of the era. This essay utilizes research from a multi-disciplinary body of sources, which includes sociology, cultural history, creative literature and literary criticism, autobiography, biography, and journalism.

InPlaying in the Dark, Toni Morrison sets out to chart a new “geography” in literary criticism, to provide a “map” for locating what she calls the “Africanist” presence in the American literary tradition. The assumption of Americanist critics, she argues, has been that “traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the fourhundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then, African Americans in the United States. It assumes that this presence — which shaped the body politic, the Constitution, and the entire history of the culture — has had no significant place or consequence in the origin and development of that culture's literature.” For Morrison, recording the Africanist presence produces nothing less than an absolute revision of our notion of what constitutes the American literary tradition.

Resumo: O presente artigo propõe uma análise do conto “Thonon-les-Bains”, extraído da coletânea Ilhéu de Pássaros (1983), de Orlanda Amarílis, escritora cabo-verdiana. No conto em estudo, a violência onipresente se manifesta em múltiplas facetas. A reflexão aqui empreendida busca compreender as estratégias de encenação da violência utilizadas por Amarílis, dedicando uma atenção mais específica à violência perpetrada contra a personagem Piedade, protagonista da história. A análise desenvolvida é fundamentada em textos da crítica literária, recorrendo ainda ao suporte de outros campos do saber: Antropologia, Sociologia e Psicanálise. Nesse contexto, o artigo além de discutir a respeito das estratégias de encenação da violência no conto, procura contribuir para a divulgação da obra de Orlanda Amarílis, escritora ainda pouco conhecida, mesmo entre os/as pesquisadores/as das Literaturas Africanas de Língua Portuguesa.Palavras-chave: Orlanda Amarílis; literatura cabo-verdiana; conto; denúncia; violência.Abstract: This study focuses on the analysis of the “Thonon-les-Bains” tale, part of the collection Ilhéu de Pássaros (1983), by Orlanda Amarílis, a Cape Verdean writer. In this story, the ubiquitous violence manifested is multifaceted. As such, we are concerned with the strategies of violence representation used by Amarílis in the construction of “Thonon-les-Bains”, mostly looking at Piedade, the protagonist of the tale. The research is based on Literary Criticism scholarship, also taking into account other knowledge areas: Anthropology, Sociology, and Psychoanalysis. In this context, this article, albeit discussing strategies of violence representation, aims at contributing to the dissemination of Orlanda Amarílis’ work, a writer who is still not well known, even among scholars of African Literature of Portuguese language.Keywords: Orlanda Amarílis; Cape Verdean literature; tale; complaint; violence.

In 1934, Aaron Douglas created an epic four-panel mural series, Aspects of Negro Life (1934), for the branch library on 135th Street in Manhattan, now the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The panels answered a call, issued by the first major program for federal support of the arts in the United States, to represent “an American scene.” In them, Douglas traced the trajectory of African American history in four stages and across two mass migrations: from Africa into enslavement in America; through Emancipation and Reconstruction; into the modern Jim Crow South; and then northward with the Great Migration to Harlem itself. The narrative Douglas constructed was remarkable in both its historical sweep and as a story of America seen through Black eyes. This essay explores how Douglas's approach to the trenchant and understudied Aspects of Negro Life panels was shaped by rich conversations across a decade-about what it meant to be Black in America, how the “African” in “African-American” was to be understood, and what a distinctly African-American modernism might be-with an interdisciplinary nexus of thinkers, activists, and artists that included W. E. B. Du Bois; a co-founder of the NAACP and co-editor of the Crisis, sociologist Charles S. Johnson; poet-activist James Weldon Johnson; bibliophile Arturo Schomburg; and philosopher-critic Alain Locke. Looking at Douglas's visual narrative in this context offers insight into how parallel practices of archive-building, art making, history writing, and criticism came together not only to shape a vision of America but also to champion a model of Black modernism framed through diaspora.

Abstract Exploring various absences—what is or should not be represented in addition to the unspeakable in terms of racial representations—is the through line of three recent books about race and speculative fictions. Mark C. Jerng’s Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction (2018) argues racial worldmaking has been at the center of speculative fictions in the US. In Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination (2017), Kristen Lillvis takes one of the primary thematic concerns of black speculative fictions—the posthuman—and rereads some of the most canonical works in the black feminist literary canon through that lens. Lillvis addresses a traditional problem in the turn to discussions of the posthuman and nonhuman, namely, what does it mean to rethink black people’s humanity when they have traditionally been categorized as nonhuman? Sami Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (2018) speaks to the absence of a framework of disability in African American literature and cultural criticism. In addressing absence—or, perhaps silence—Schalk offers the most paradigm-shifting challenge to what is speakable and unspeakable: the problem of linking blackness with disability and how to reframe our treatment of these categories.

African literature has strong relation with colonialism, not only because they had ever been colonized but also because of civil war. Civil Peace (1971), a short story written by Chinua Achebe, tells about how Nigerian survive and have to struggle to live after Nigerian Civil War. It is about the effects of the war on the people, and the “civil peace” that followed. The Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Nigerian-Biafran War, 6 July 1967–15 January 1970, was a political conflict caused by the attempted annexation of the southeastern provinces of Nigeria as the self-proclaimed Republic of Biafra. The conflict was the result of economic, ethnic, cultural and religious tensions among the various peoples of Nigeria. Knowing the relation between the story and the Nigerian Civil War, it is assured that there is a history depicted in Civil Peace. In this article, the writer portrays the history and the phenomenon of colonization in Nigeria by using new historical and postcolonial criticism approaches.Keywords: history, colonization, civil war

<p>Este texto examina a literatura de viagem de Henrique de Carvalho, procurando observar as motivações sóciopolíticas que redundaram na expedição portuguesa às terras lundas e na escritura de <em>Ethnografia e História Tradicional dos Povos da Lunda (Expedição Portugueza ao Muatiânvua 1884-1888). </em>O relato do explorador e seu testemunho histórico de cunho positivista sobre a região e a população do nordeste angolano, Lunda, obedecem aos interesses colonizadores portugueses na demarcação dos limites territoriais da colônia de Angola. A análise da concepção do viajante a respeito da África revela uma visão eurocêntrica, que reafirma a idéia de que o africano era incapaz de produzir História.</p> <p>This text examines the travel literature by Henrique de Carvalho, trying to observe the socio-political motivations which resulted in the Portuguese expedition to the lundas territory and in the writing of <em>Ethnografia e História Tradicional dos Povos da Lunda (Expedição Portugueza ao Muatiânvua 1884-1888). </em>The explorer’s account and his historical testimony of a positivist nature about the region and the population of the Angolan northeast, Lunda, obey the Portuguese settlers’ interest in defining the bordering limits of the colony of Angola. The analysis of the traveler’s conception about Africa reveals an eurocentric vision which reaffirms the idea that the African was incapable of producing History.</p>

This paper focuses on the analysis of religious satire in Song of Lawino. The study occasionally refers to Okots life history and ideological inclinations and the review of related literature giveng background information that clarifies Okot pBiteks writing as a product of a rich Acholi oral tradition. While a lot has been written on Okots creative works, little attention has been given to the use of satire. The study therefore, identifies and evaluates Okots use of satire in Song of Lawino determines the use of language to achieve satire in the text, and discusses how the author uses satire as a tool to share ideas and opinions on religious perspectives in the society. This study treats satire as the humorous criticism of human weaknesses and foibles and uses this parameter to identify it in the Song of Lawino. This is to throw light on the creative works of Okots and highlight circumstances that may have shaped him into a satirist. The upshot of all these is that the songs are appropriately contextualized with the ultimate finding that satire is an indigenous African phenomenon amply and ably deployed in Okots art.

This paper focuses on the analysis of religious satire in Song of Lawino. The study occasionally refers to Okots life history and ideological inclinations and the review of related literature giveng background information that clarifies Okot pBiteks writing as a product of a rich Acholi oral tradition. While a lot has been written on Okots creative works, little attention has been given to the use of satire. The study therefore, identifies and evaluates Okots use of satire in Song of Lawino determines the use of language to achieve satire in the text, and discusses how the author uses satire as a tool to share ideas and opinions on religious perspectives in the society. This study treats satire as the humorous criticism of human weaknesses and foibles and uses this parameter to identify it in the Song of Lawino. This is to throw light on the creative works of Okots and highlight circumstances that may have shaped him into a satirist. The upshot of all these is that the songs are appropriately contextualized with the ultimate finding that satire is an indigenous African phenomenon amply and ably deployed in Okots art.

For over thirty years, History in Africa: A Journal of Method has been at the forefront of publishing scholarship on textual analysis and criticism of African historical sources, historiographical essays on the literature concerning Africa's past, bibliographical essays on relevant historical topics, reflections on the role of theory in historical investigation, and archive reports. The new editorial team will maintain this profile with an emphasis on theory and method, while aiming to enhance the journal by focusing on issues that will expand its appeal beyond its current audience. We seek to broaden the framing of methodological and historiographical topics to discuss new information technologies and pedagogical issues. The new editors work with an inclusive definition of “History” and invite scholars, no matter what discipline, to join the discussion and analysis of the past. In the multi-polar world of the twenty-first century, the new editors embrace the “in” in the title and are committed to publishing an increased number of articles from scholars on the continent. We also operate with a pluriform definition of “Africa” that includes the worlds of the diaspora and recognizes regional variations in the continent. The new editors wish to bring new perspectives associated with Africa's twenty-first century renaissance into the journal. Finally, the new editors will remain faithful to the focus of David Henige, the founding and long-serving editor of History in Africa, on the critical analysis of both the epistemological bases of historical inquiry and the construction of arguments about the past.

As literaturas africanas em língua portuguesa despontam com muita força no século XX e, aos poucos, ganham espaço na contemporaneidade por meio de narrativas que problematizam a escrita da história a partir de epistemologias eurocêntricas. Nosso objetivo é analisar o romance Lueji, o nascimento de um império (1990), de Pepetela, a partir de olhares que nos ajudem a compreender de que forma a memória, a história e a tradição se entrelaçam em espaços-tempos diferentes e como as ações do presente se constituem por meio de uma reatualização da memória sem a pretensão de veracidade da história oficial. A tradição se constitui então como o elo entre o passado, a memória, e o futuro, reinvenção contínua do presente. As personagens centrais, Lu e Lueji, participam de realidades que questionam a força das tradições, dependendo das suas interpretações para validá-las ou não, cada uma em seus contextos. *** Memory, history and tradition: a dialogue between the old and the new novel Lueji, o nascimento de um império ***The African literatures in the Portuguese language appear and rise, strongly, in the 20th century and, slowly, get their space in the contemporaneity through the narratives which used to question the historical written based on the Eurocentric epistemology. Our goal is analyze the novel Lueji, o nascimento em um império (1990), by Pepetela, through points of view that help us to comprehend the way memory, story and tradition intertwine on different space-times and how the present actions are made by the memory upgrade without the needing of the legitimate story veracity. The tradition, therefore, was made as a bound between the past, memory and the future, a continuous present remake. The main characters, Lu and Lueji, participate on realities that question the traditions strength, depending on their interpretations to validate or no, each one in their own context.Keywords: Lueji; Angola; Lusophone African literature; Memory; History.

RESUMONo início do processo de colonização, os portugueses tiveram de conviver com as muitas línguas que eram faladas pelos povos indígenas que ocupavam o território brasileiro. A partir do século XVIII, um Decreto do governo do Marquês de Pombal proibiu o uso da chamada língua geral e demais línguas nativas, impondo ao povo brasileiro a línguaportuguesa como língua oficial. Entretanto, muitas línguas indígenas permaneceram, talvez como forma de resistência. O português é a língua oficial do Brasil, mas esse mesmo Brasil é dono de um patrimônio linguístico que conta com cerca de 200 línguas indígenas, além de ter grande influência em outras línguas de origem africana, europeia e asiática. Destarte, o presente trabalho, partindo de uma análise crítica, visa trazer algumas concepções sobre essa diversidade linguística na história da educação brasileira. Para tanto, esta pesquisa faz um breve retrospecto sobre o processo que levou a hegemonização do português falado no Brasil, discute os métodos de repressão aos povos migrantes do sul do Brasil e o processo de extinção das línguas dospovos indígenas, além de trazer uma breve abordagem sobre a variação linguística no que tange ao português falado assim como o escrito. A metodologia aplicada ao trabalho se ateve a um estudo descritivo, do tipo revisão bibliográfica, que se respaldou em literaturas científicas e trabalhos acadêmicos referenciados, que discutem a diversidade cultural e sociolinguística, com enfoques distintos.Palavras-chave: Diversidade. Língua. Português.ABSTRACTAt the beginning of the colonization process, the Portuguese had to live with many languages that were spoken by the indigenous people who occupied the Brazilian territory. From the eighteenth century, a government decree of the Marquis of Pombal banned the use of socalled general language and other native languages, requiring the Brazilian people to Portuguese as an official language. However, manyindigenous languages remained, perhaps as a form of resistance. Portuguese is the official language of Brazil. But that same Brazil owns a linguistic heritage that has about 200 indigenous languages, besides having great influence on other languages of African, European and Asian origin. Thus, the present study, based on a critical analysis, aimsto bring some views on this linguistic diversity in the history of Brazilian education. Therefore this research makes a brief review of the process that led to the hegemony of the Portuguese spoken in Brazil, discusses the methods of repression of migrant people in southern Brazil and theprocess of extinction of the languages of indigenous peoples, and bring a brief approach on linguistic variation in relation to the Portuguese spoken as well as written. The methodology applied to this work adhered to a descriptive study, the type literature review, which is backed by scientific literature and referenced academic papers that discuss cultural diversity and sociolinguistics with different approaches. Keywords: Diversity. Language. Portuguese.RESUMENAl comienzo del proceso de colonización, los portugueses tuvieron que convivir con muchas lenguas que eran habladas por los indígenas que ocupaban el territorio brasileño. A partir del siglo XVIII, un Decreto del gobierno del Marqués de Pombal prohibió el uso de lallamada lengua general y otras lenguas nativas, imponiendo al puebblo brasileño la lengua portuguesa como lengua oficial. Sin embargo, muchos idiomas indígenas siguieron siendo, tal vez como una forma de resistencia. El portugués es la lengua oficial de Brasil, pero esse mismo Brasil posee un patrimonio lingüístico que tiene alrededor de 200 lenguas indígenas, además de tener una gran influencia en otras lenguas de origen africana, europea y asiática. Así, el presente estudio, basado en un análisis crítico, tiene como objetivo traer algunas concepciones sobre esta diversidade linguística en la historia de la educación brasileña. Por lo tanto, en esta investigación se hace una breve retrospectiva del proceso que condujo a la hegemonización del portugués hablado en Brasil, se discute los métodos de represión a las personas migrantes del sur de Brasil y el processo de extinción de las lenguas de los pueblos indígenas, además de traer un enfoque sobre la variación linguística en relación al portugués hablado, así como escrito. La metodología aplicada al trabajo se basó en un estudio descriptivo, con una la revisión bibliográfica, que se respaldó en literaturas científicas y trabajos académicos referenciados, que tratan sobre la diversidad cultural y sociolinguística, con diferentes enfoques.Palabras clave: Diversidad. Idioma. Portugués.

Despite the recurrent momentum of historical and intellectual studies and literature on the Algerian liberation revolution 1954-1962 as a founding event for the contemporary history of Algeria, especially the French writings, which drew a certain pattern of ideology that serves the purposes of the French colonial historical school in the first place, and perhaps the study in our hands is worthy to be a field It is a field for analysis, criticism, and comparison to go beyond the epic and ceremonial images that we find in the official readings of the topics in which politics intersect with historical legitimacy, and ideologies intersect with the civilizational principles of the Algerian revolution. And between this and that, the researcher finds himself when delving into the topics and issues related to the liberation revolution, including the subject of Frantz Fanon's contributions to this founding event of the contemporary Algerian state, in which numerous writings have attempted to present a coherent picture of this character of Martinique of origin, Algerian presence, and African influence and influence.The aim of this study is to shed light, analytically and critically, on the basic features of the contributions of this global intellectual stature to the issue of the ideological development of the Algerian revolution after 1958, and bypassing the trend of some historical and social studies that reach the point of denying the charters and reference texts of the Algerian revolution. Ahead of "the document of the first of November 1954, and the document of the Soumam conference 1956," and established a historical background according to which Fanon is a viewer of the Algerian revolution.

A World Among these Islands: Essays on Literature, Race, and National Identity in Antillean America, by Roberto Márquez (reviewed by Peter Hulme) Caribbean Reasonings: The Thought of New World, The Quest for Decolonisation, edited by Brian Meeks & Norman Girvan (reviewed by Cary Fraser) Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination, by Paul B. Miller (reviewed by Kerstin Oloff) Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa’s Gaze, by Maria Cristina Fumagalli (reviewed by Maureen Shay) Who Abolished Slavery: Slave Revolts and Abolitionism: A Debate with João Pedro Marques, edited by Seymour Drescher & Pieter C. Emmer, and Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, edited by Derek R . Peterson (reviewed by Claudius Fergus) The Mediterranean Apprenticeship of British Slavery, by Gustav Ungerer (reviewed by James Walvin) Children in Slavery through the Ages, edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers & Joseph C. Miller (reviewed by Indrani Chatterjee) The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, by Peter T. Leeson (reviewed by Kris Lane) Theorizing a Colonial Caribbean-Atlantic Imaginary: Sugar and Obeah, by Keith Sandiford (reviewed by Elaine Savory) Created in the West Indies: Caribbean Perspectives on V.S. Naipaul, edited by Jennifer Rahim & Barbara Lalla (reviewed by Supriya M. Nair) Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature, by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (reviewed by Lyndon K. Gill) Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, by Kaiama L. Glover (reviewed by Asselin Charles) Divergent Dictions: Contemporary Dominican Literature, by Néstor E. Rodríguez (reviewed by Dawn F. Stinchcomb) The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives, edited by Lucy Evans, Mark McWatt & Emma Smith (reviewed by Leah Rosenberg) Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba, by Todd Ramón Ochoa (reviewed by Brian Brazeal) El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader, by Araceli Tinajero (reviewed by Juan José Baldrich) Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State Formation in Cuba, 1868-1959, by Gillian McGillivray (reviewed by Consuelo Naranjo Orovio) The Purposes of Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Cuba and Hawai’i, by Christine Skwiot (reviewed by Amalia L. Cabezas) A History of the Cuban Revolution, by Aviva Chomsky (reviewed by Michelle Chase) The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana, by Todd F. Tietchen (reviewed by Stephen Fay) The Devil in the Details: Cuban Antislavery Narrative in the Postmodern Age, by Claudette M. Williams (reviewed by Gera Burton) Screening Cuba: Film Criticism as Political Performance during the Cold War, by Hector Amaya (reviewed by Ann Marie Stock) Perceptions of Cuba: Canadian and American Policies in Comparative Perspective, by Lana Wylie (reviewed by Julia Sagebien) Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow, by Frank Andre Guridy (reviewed by Susan Greenbaum) The Irish in the Atlantic World, edited by David T. Gleeson (reviewed by Donald Harman Akenson) The Chinese in Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Walton Look Lai & Tan Chee-Beng (reviewed by John Kuo Wei Tchen) The Island of One People: An Account of the History of the Jews of Jamaica, by Marilyn Delevante & Anthony Alberga (reviewed by Barry Stiefel) Creole Jews: Negotiating Community in Colonial Suriname, by Wieke Vink (reviewed by Aviva Ben-Ur) Only West Indians: Creole Nationalism in the British West Indies, by F.S.J. Ledgister (reviewed by Jerome Teelucksingh) Cultural DNA: Gender at the Root of Everyday Life in Rural Jamaica, by Diana J. Fox (reviewed by Jean Besson) Women in Grenadian History, 1783-1983, by Nicole Laurine Phillip (reviewed by Bernard Moitt) British-Controlled Trinidad and Venezuela: A History of Economic Interests and Subversions, 1830-1962, by Kelvin Singh (reviewed by Stephen G. Rabe) Export/Import Trends and Economic Development in Trinidad, 1919-1939, by Doddridge H.N. Alleyne (reviewed by Rita Pemberton) Post-Colonial Trinidad: An Ethnographic Journal, by Colin Clarke & Gillian Clarke (reviewed by Patricia van Leeuwaarde Moonsammy) Poverty in Haiti: Essays on Underdevelopment and Post Disaster Prospects, by Mats Lundahl (reviewed by Robert Fatton Jr.) From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti, and Pan Americanism, 1870-1964, by Millery Polyné (reviewed by Brenda Gayle Plummer) Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture and the Earthquake of 2010, edited by Martin Munro (reviewed by Jonna Knappenberger) Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora, by Margarita A. Mooney (reviewed by Rose-Marie Chierici) This Spot of Ground: Spiritual Baptists in Toronto, by Carol B. Duncan (reviewed by James Houk) Interroger les morts: Essai sur le dynamique politique des Noirs marrons ndjuka du Surinam et de la Guyane, by Jean-Yves Parris (reviewed by H.U.E. Thoden van Velzen & W. van Wetering)

-Monika Arnez, Keith Foulcher ,Clearing a space; Postcolonial readings of modern Indonesian literature. Leiden: KITlV Press, 2002, 381 pp. [Verhandelingen 202.], Tony Day (eds) -R.H. Barnes, Thomas Reuter, The house of our ancestors; Precedence and dualism in highland Balinese society. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002, viii + 359 pp. [Verhandelingen 198.] -Freek Colombijn, Adriaan Bedner, Administrative courts in Indonesia; A socio-legal study. The Hague: Kluwer law international, 2001, xiv + 300 pp. [The London-Leiden series on law, administration and development 6.] -Manuelle Franck, Peter J.M. Nas, The Indonesian town revisited. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian studies, 2002, vi + 428 pp. [Southeast Asian dynamics.] -Hans Hägerdal, Ernst van Veen, Decay or defeat? An inquiry into the Portuguese decline in Asia 1580-1645. Leiden: Research school of Asian, African and Amerindian studies, 2000, iv + 306 pp. [Studies on overseas history, 1.] -Rens Heringa, Genevieve Duggan, Ikats of Savu; Women weaving history in eastern Indonesia. Bangkok: White Lotus, 2001, xiii + 151 pp. [Studies in the material culture of Southeast Asia 1.] -August den Hollander, Kees Groeneboer, Een vorst onder de taalgeleerden; Herman Nuebronner van der Tuuk; Afgevaardigde voor Indië van het Nederlandsch Bijbelgenootschap 1847-1873; Een bronnenpublicatie. Leiden: KITlV Uitgeverij, 2002, 965 pp. -Edwin Jurriëns, William Atkins, The politics of Southeast Asia's new media. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002, xii + 235 pp. -Victor T. King, Poline Bala, Changing border and identities in the Kelabit highlands; Anthropological reflections on growing up in a Kelabit village near an international frontier. Kota Samarahan, Sarawak: Unit Penerbitan Universiti Malayasia Sarawak, Institute of East Asian studies, 2002, xiv + 142 pp. [Dayak studies contemporary society series 1.] -Han Knapen, Bernard Sellato, Innermost Borneo; Studies in Dayak cultures. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2002, 221 pp. -Michael Laffan, Rudolf Mrázek, Engineers of happy land; Technology and nationalism in a colony. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002, xvii + 311 pp. [Princeton studies in culture/power/history 15.] -Johan Meuleman, Michael Francis Laffan, Islamic nationhood and colonial Indonesia; The umma below the winds. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, xvi + 294 pp. [SOAS/RoutledgeCurzon studies on the Middle East 1.] -Rudolf Mrázek, Heidi Dahles, Tourism, heritage and national culture in Java; Dilemmas of a local community. Leiden: International Institute for Asian studies/Curzon, 2001, xvii + 257 pp. -Anke Niehof, Kathleen M. Adams ,Home and hegemony; Domestic service and identity politics in South and Southeast Asia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000, 307 pp., Sara Dickey (eds) -Robert van Niel, H.W. van den Doel, Afscheid van Indië; De val van het Nederlandse imperium in Azië. Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2001, 475 pp. -Anton Ploeg, Bruce M. Knauft, Exchanging the past; A rainforest world of before and after. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, x + 303 pp. -Harry A. Poeze, Nicolaas George Bernhard Gouka, De petitie-Soetardjo; Een Hollandse misser in Indië? (1936-1938). Amsterdam: Rozenberg, 303 pp. -Harry A. Poeze, Jaap Harskamp (compiler), The Indonesian question; The Dutch/Western response to the struggle for independence in Indonesia 1945-1950; an annotated catalogue of primary materials held in the British Library. London; The British Library, 2001, xx + 210 pp. -Elisabeth Schröder-Butterfill, Jan Breman ,Good times and bad times in rural Java; Case study of socio-economic dynamics in two villages towards the end of the twentieth century. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002, xii + 330 pp. [Verhandelingen 195.], Gunawan Wiradi (eds) -Mariëtte van Selm, L.P. van Putten, Ambitie en onvermogen; Gouverneurs-generaal van Nederlands-Indië 1610-1796. Rotterdam: ILCO-productions, 2002, 192 pp. -Heather Sutherland, William Cummings, Making blood white; Historical transformations in early modern Makassar. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002, xiii + 257 pp. -Gerard Termorshuizen, Olf Praamstra, Een feministe in de tropen; De Indische jaren van Mina Kruseman. Leiden: KITlV Uitgeverij, 2003, 111 p. [Boekerij 'Oost en West'.] -Jaap Timmer, Dirk A.M. Smidt, Kamoro art; Tradition and innovation in a New Guinea culture; With an essay on Kamoro life and ritual by Jan Pouwer. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers/Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, 2003, 157 pp. -Sikko Visscher, Amy L. Freedman, Political participation and ethnic minorities; Chinese overseas in Malaysia, Indonesia and the United States. London: Routledge, 2000, xvi + 231 pp. -Reed L. Wadley, Mary Somers Heidhues, Golddiggers, farmers, and traders in the 'Chinese districts' of West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia program, Cornell University, 2003, 309 pp. -Edwin Wieringa, Jan Parmentier ,Peper, Plancius en porselein; De reis van het schip Swarte Leeuw naar Atjeh en Bantam, 1601-1603. Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2003, 237 pp. [Werken van de Linschoten-Vereeniging 101.], Karel Davids, John Everaert (eds) -Edwin Wieringa, Leonard Blussé ,Kennis en Compagnie; De Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie en de moderne wetenschap. Amsterdam: Balans, 2002, 191 pp., Ilonka Ooms (eds) -Edwin Wieringa, Femme S. Gaastra, De geschiedenis van de VOC. Zutphen; Wal_burg Pers, 2002, 192 pp.

The study of African literature in Portuguese was a largely vacant field in universities in the USA and the UK in the 1960s, in contrast to the emerging study of Anglophone and Francophone African literatures, which were well under way as both Britain and France completed their processes of decolonization. In the 1960s, Gerald Moser had raised awareness of individual writers such as the neo-realist novelist Castro Soromenho, and Clive Willis had translated the ethnographic tales of Óscar Ribas; however, Russell Hamilton was the first to write a comprehensive, cohesive, and balanced study of the field in Voices from an Empire: A History of Afro-Portuguese Literature.

In this paper I explore the human-dog interaction in Oswald Pirow’s Ashambeni (1955). I focus on the position of the dog in Pirow’s depiction of a world where the lives of animals and humans, and the natural and supernatural world, are entangled. In the novel, there are references to real historical figures and particulars of Portuguese East Africa and the South African Lowveld around 1850. The historical context sketched in the novel is from Pirow’s far-right, racist perspective. While most critics place Pirow’s work in the folkloric tradition, Ashambeni is more than a folkloric tale since it promotes Pirow’s offensive views. In Ashambeni the role of the dog ranges from valuable possession to loving companion to hunting and fighting tool. It shows that a dog history cannot be separated from a human history, and that dogs are part of the social and cultural life of humans. The depiction of human-dog interaction in Ashambeni points to a historical anthropocentric entanglement rather than the boundary-crossing entanglement between human and animal proposed by contemporary human-animal studies. The human characters control the dog characters’ status in the human society. Even more problematic, the description of the dogs is tied up with Pirow’s racist ideology and subjective account of history.

The study of the Portuguese marine ichthyofauna has a long historical tradition, rooted back in the 18th Century. Here we present an annotated checklist of the marine fishes from Portuguese waters, including the area encompassed by the proposed extension of the Portuguese continental shelf and the Economic Exclusive Zone (EEZ). The list is based on historical literature records and taxon occurrence data obtained from natural history collections, together with new revisions and occurrences. It comprises a total of 1191 species, distributed among 3 superclasses, 4 classes, 42 orders, 212 families and 617 genera. If considering only the EEZ and present territorial waters, this list represents an increase of 230 species (27.8%) and of 238 species (29.0%), when compared to the information available in FishBase (2012) and in the last checklist of marine and estuarine fishes of Portugal (1993), respectively. The order Perciformes shows the highest diversity, with 54 families, 162 genera and 299 species. Stomiidae (80 species), Myctophidae (71 species) and Macrouridae (37 species) are the richest families. From the listed species, 734 are present off mainland Portugal, 857 off the Azores and 766 off Madeira. Within the limits of the examined area, three species are reported for the first time in mainland Portugal and twenty-nine records are identified as doubtful. A total of 133 species have been recorded from the extended Portuguese continental shelf (2 off mainland Portugal, 117 off the Azores and 14 off Madeira), two of which are common to the Azores and Madeira extensions. Biogeographically, the Atlantic group is the most important (548 species – 46.01%), followed by the Lusitanian group (256 species – 21.49%), the African group (71 species – 5.96%), the Boreal group (34 species – 2.85%), the Mediterranean group (31 species – 2.60%), the Macaronesian group (21 species – 1.76%), the Atlantic/African group (19 species – 1.60%) and the Mediterranean/African and the Arctic groups, each with only 1 species (0.08%). Regarding the preferences for vertical habitat, the demersal fishes are the most important group (305 species – 25.61%), followed by the mesopelagic group (228 species – 19.14%), the bathypelagic group (164 species – 13.77%), the benthopelagic group (147 species – 12.34%), the bathydemersal group (115 species – 9.66%), the reef-associated group (88 species – 7.39%), the pelagic group (74 species – 6.21%), the epipelagic group (58 species – 4.87%) and 1 species (0.08%) of the benthic group. The oceanic habitat is the best represented group comprising 446 species (37.45%), followed by the shelf group (199 species – 16.71%), the slope group (164 species – 13.77%), the inner shelf group (89 species – 7.47%), the coastal group (70 species – 5.88%), the outer shelf group (29 species – 2.43%) and the oceanic/shelf group (7 species – 0.59%).

Although critical interest in Roy Campbell’s work remains lively and his place in South African literary history seems secure, he is not a vital presence in the new South Africa; his work has become peripheral to metropolitan English literature, a small manifestation of a more general shift in global culture. Where then does Roy Campbell stand? Is there a new context for his work? In a review of a range of criticism from the first decade of the 21st century, this article finds that Roy Campbell’s work can be rewardingly read in the context of the Graeco-Roman classical inheritance that he embraced and the Romance culture in which he settled. This recognition has both enriched the resonance of Campbell’s poetry and aligned him with other artists who have been re-absorbed into Europe as the colonial appropriation of Africa recedes.

The word 'nigger' is arguably the most charged epithet in American English; thus it is surprising that this word has been appropriated by some African Americans to refer to themselves. To be precise, the African-American version of this term is not 'nigger' but 'nigga', a word that has, as Geneva Smitherman notes, "a variety of meanings ranging from positive to negative to neutral" (Black Talk 167). Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his study of African-American literature, provides a theoretical foundation for understanding why some African Americans use this word and how it operates rhetorically. Building on Gates's work, I will argue that the co-optation of the slur often involves a complex of three rhetorical devices that fall under the rubric of an African-American rhetorical strategy called Signifyin(g)—a term that will be discussed at length later. The first of these devices is agnominatio, defined as "the repetition of a word with an alteration of both one letter and a sound" (Gates 46). The second, semantic inversion, is the reversal of the meaning of a term (Holt qtd. in Smitherman, "Chain"). Chiastic slaying, the third rhetorical strategy, is a critique that transforms the status of a group or individual.1 Through these three modes of rhetorical transfiguration, the slur 'nigger' becomes 'nigga' a positive term that carries with it a critique of racism. I will further argue that all of these rhetorical devices operate through a principle I term "semantic looping" in which a new term derives meaning by continual reference to an older, existing term. This principle is a key to understanding how Signifyin(g) works in the appropriation of 'nigger' and helps to reveal how, in the words of Michel Foucault, the appropriation is a culturally rooted form of "reverse discourse" (101). Ultimately, this rhetorical analysis reveals that the African-American usage of 'nigga' is a strategy for asserting the humanity of black people in the face of continuing racism, a strategy that celebrates an anti-assimilationist vision of African-American identity. Foucault has argued that while the naming of oppressed groups by those in power serves as an instrument for oppression, such naming can also engender group identification and resistance to oppression (101). The coining of the word 'homosexual', for example, allowed for the repression of gay people but also allowed homosexuals to organise a gay rights movement using the very terminology utilized to oppress them (Foucault 101). One strategy for resisting hostile slurs like 'queer' or 'nigger' is for the oppressed group to appropriate the name and transform it into a rallying cry or "reverse discourse". An understanding of how 'nigga' operates as a reverse discourse requires a culturally rooted rhetorical analysis of the term. Gates, in The Signifyin(g) Monkey, provides background for such an analysis. Because his project is ultimately to derive an African-American theory of literary criticism, he touches on the appropriation of 'nigger' only briefly, asserting that a "political offensive" was mounted against the term by African-Americans through a black rhetorical strategy called Signifyin(g) (47). Gates, however, does not explain precisely how Signifyin(g) works in this case, except to suggest that it involves agnominatio (46). Thus 'nigger' becomes 'nigga', a word that differs from the racial slur but originates from and recalls it.2 Although Gates's commentary on the appropriation of 'nigger' amounts to little more than a sentence, much of his explication of the term Signifyin(g) implicitly applies to the co-optation of 'nigger'. The rhetorical analysis presented in this paper is a logical extension of Gates's initial linkage of the appropriation of 'nigger' with the rhetorical practice of Signifyin(g). The social baggage attached to 'nigga' assures that every use of the term is double-voiced in the Bakhtinian sense. More precisely, 'nigga' is a Bakhtinian parody of 'nigger'; the new connotation parodies or comments on the original because the new term carries with it the history of its pejorative use as well as the refashioned connotation of defiant group pride.3 This kind of rhetorical turn or critique is an example of the African-American rhetorical practice Gates identifies as Signifyin(g). Pinning down exactly what constitutes Signifyin(g) is difficult. Numerous black language scholars have commented on the expansiveness of the term.4 Gates argues that in its broadest sense, to Signify means to be "figurative," further noting that "to define it in practice is to define it through any number of its embedded tropes" (81).5 For our purposes it can be described as a rhetorical action that indirectly critiques another term or sign by revising it. Gates explains that, fundamentally, this revision and critique involve "repetition, with a signal difference" (51). Gates distinguishes the African-American term, 'Signifyin(g)', from the word 'signifying' by capitalizing the 'S' and bracketing the 'g' (46). It is helpful to think of the former term as 'Signifyin(g) on' (or critiquing) something whereas the latter word 'signifies' (or means) something but does not inherently involve a critique. Thus, to parody the motions of a police officer behind his or her back 'Signifies on' the officer and 'signifies' one's disrespect.6 Signifyin(g) is inherently a counter-puncher's strategy, an act of resistance against an oppressive force. Gates even goes so far as to call it the "slave's trope" (52). In Signifyin(g), the revised term, through its parodic double-voicedness, enters into a semantic loop with the original term; recollection of past oppressive usage must occur to fuel the term's new meaning. Figure 1 - Semantic Loop of Semantic Inversion and Agnominatio This semantic loop recalls what W.E. B. Dubois termed African-American double consciousness, a consciousness that yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of the world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. (16-17) While 'nigga' recalls how blacks have been measured by the tape of the world, it also defies this estimation through ironic revision of the name. Although Dubois would criticize this pathway through the white term as a road to false consciousness, others might insist that since revision of the white term occurs through distinctly African-American rhetorical strategies, the revision is emblematic of an authentically African-American consciousness—which is a double consciousness. In this view the revision does not attempt to reconcile what DuBois calls the "two unreconciled strivings" of the black person as "an American and a Negro" but instead involves them in an endless interplay (17). The interplay of the two signs sustains an antagonistic stand toward the dominant white community through the polemical comment: "this is how whites see us but we are something more". 'Nigga', then, is "authentically black" speech because it recognizes and maintains the divide between black and white worlds. As Smitherman notes: [e]ncoded within the rhetoric of racial resistance, nigga is used to demarcate (Black) culturally rooted from (white) culturally assimilated African Americans. Niggaz are those Bloods (Blacks) who are down for Blackness and identify with the trials as well as triumphs of the Black experience… ("Chain") The defiance implied by the revision of the white slur is also an assertion of human subjectivity. Gates identifies a parallel strategy in African-American slave narratives. Referring to Frederick Douglass's famous chiasmus—"You have seen how a man became a slave, you will see how a slave became a man."—Gates asserts that "Douglass's major contribution to the slave narrative was to make chiasmus the central trope of slave narration, in which a slave-object writes himself or herself into a human subject through the act of writing" (172). By comparison, through the semantic inversion of 'nigger'/'nigga', dehumanized blacks speak themselves into human subjects through the act of speaking. This transfiguration conforms to what Gates terms "chiastic slaying" (66). His somewhat off-hand phrase is inspired by the African-American use of chiasmus, which is defined as, "a grammatical figure by which the order of words in one of two parallel clauses is inverted in the other" (Oxford English Dictionary qtd. in Grothe). Chiasmus is often represented as an ABBA pattern (so Douglass's chiasmus would be reduced to: (A) man - (B) slave - (B) slave - (A) man). In Gates's usage, chiastic slaying involves repetition and reversal but not necessarily a literal ABBA pattern of chiasmus. In the same vein, 'nigga' is a repetition of 'nigger' that reverses the position of African Americans (from objects to subjects). Analogously, 'nigger to nigga' can be conceived of as the inverted second clause of a chiastic statement like Douglass's 'man - slave - slave - man' in which personhood and agency are re-affirmed. This re-affirmation of humanity implicit in 'nigga' is not likely to be understood by many whites given, as Smitherman notes, that they often fail to recognize the semantic difference between 'nigger' and 'nigga'.7 Since whites are frequently unaware of the Signification of 'nigga', it is impossible for African Americans to kill (i.e. end) the white use of the racist term. In the context of Signification, chiastic slaying does not put an end to the idea Signified upon. In fact, Signification must be activated by what Gates calls the "absent presence" of the original term (48). The critique of racism and assertion of subjectivity implicit in the employment of 'nigga' is not aimed at white people or the elimination of their sign; it is aimed at a black audience that must survive in a continually racist environment. What, then, is the "slaying" of chiastic slaying? It must be seen as a refutation of the original term or sign. In the case of 'nigga', it is a rejection of the dehumanization implied by 'nigger' with the recognition that African Americans will still be continually subjected to this libel despite its refutation. Thus, the chiastic slaying of 'nigger' by 'nigga' requires a continual interplay or semantic loop between the two terms. The context of continuing racism, then, requires 'nigga' to recurrently signify on (i.e. assert the falsity of) the slur. The recurrent Signification can be thought of as a loop inscribed upon the linear chiastic pattern: Figure 2 - Semantic Loop Inscribed on the Chiastic PatternThe context of continuing racism is one factor that accounts for the value of semantic looping in African-American rhetoric. Since the semantic loops of African-American culture draw their strength from the oppression to which they react, they are continually useful. This kind of resistance does not attempt to overcome racism but instead draws African-American attention to it so blacks can survive it. The first step in this survival is to be aware, as DuBois might say, that blacks in America are perceived of as a "problem" (15). The Signification of 'nigga' also "keeps it real", by reminding African Americans of the harsh truth of racism and by continually enacting a refutation of racism through a complex of culturally familiar rhetorical strategies. In this respect, the appropriation of the white slur is, to borrow the words of Foucault, a culturally inspired "reverse discourse" aimed at responding to white oppression. The identification of semantic looping in this case opens up an array of other questions. How does semantic looping function in the appropriation of other epithets by other groups? (A few cases that may be worth investigating in addition to the previously mentioned 'queer', are 'dyke', 'girl'/'grrl' by young feminists and 'anorexia'/'ana' as well as 'bulimia'/'mia' by pro-eating-disorder advocates.) Do the cultural differences of various groups affect how semantic looping operates? What does semantic looping reveal about the struggle over authenticity or identity, especially with respect to gender, class and subculture? And lastly, how do groups respond to re-appropriations by dominant groups? (In particular I am thinking of the increasing use of 'nigga' by white American teenagers.) I hope others will find these questions worth pursuing. Notes 1. While Gates suggests that agnominatio is involved in the co-optation of 'nigger', he does not mention the term 'semantic inversion' at all (although he is obviously aware that Signifyin(g) often involves this rhetorical action). Gates's phrase, chiastic slaying, occurs only in the context of a general discussion of Signifyin(g). See 66 in Gates for his use of chiastic slaying. 2. Other English speakers including Australians and the English may find it difficult to distinguish between these spoken words and 'hear' them both as 'nigguh'. But to those from the United States the distinction is noticeable. 3. Gates identifies Bakhtin's notion of the double voiced word and his concept of narrative parody as relevant to African-American rhetoric. See 50, 110-13 and 131 in Gates. Bakhtin's most comprehensive discussion of double-voiced discourse can be found in 185-186, and 190-99. Bakhtin's distinction between parody and other types of discourse can be found in 193-99. 4. Gates lists the following as providing substantive definitions of Signifyin(g): H. Rap Brown, Roger D. Abrahams, Thomas Kochman, Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Geneva Smitherman and Ralph Ellison (71). Gates considers Mitchell Kernan's data to be more representative than the others' and even she states that she could not get consensus from her informants regarding Signifyin(g) (Gates 80-81). 5. Gates has identified numerous rhetorical strategies that can be involved in Signifyin(g). See 52 in Gates for a complete list of these tropes. 6. I build on an example from Abrahams who states that "... it is signifying to make fun of a policeman by parodying his motions behind his back..." (52). 7. Smitherman notes that the semantic inversion of 'nigger' (or 'flippin the script' as it is known in the hip-hop world) "... is often misunderstood by European Americans and castigated by some African Americans" (Chain). Smitherman's comment suggests that the ability to discriminate between the two terms (as well as one's comfort level with the usage of 'nigga') is not racially monolithic. Whites who participate in hip-hop culture, for example, are likely to see the distinction between 'nigger' and 'nigga'. Some factors that seem likely to complicate any generalization about understanding and comfort level with 'nigga' are race, affinity for hip-hop, class, age and geographic location. References Abrahams, Roger D. Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia. Chicago: Aldine, 1970. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Ed. and Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. DuBois, W.E. Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk. Greenwich: Fawcett, 1961. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1980. Grothe, Mardy. Chiasmus.com. Online. Internet. 9 Oct. 2001. Available <http://www.chiasmus.com/whatischiasmus.shtml>. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford U P, 1988. Smitherman, Geneva. "'The Chain Remain the Same'." Journal of Black Studies 28 (1997): n.pag. Online. Academic Search Elite. 10 May 2002. - - -. Black Talk. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. Links http://www.chiasmus.com/whatischiasmus.shtml Citation reference for this article MLA Style Jacobs, Andrew T.. "Appropriating a Slur" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.4 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/semantic.php>. Chicago Style Jacobs, Andrew T., "Appropriating a Slur" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 4 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/semantic.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Jacobs, Andrew T.. (2002) Appropriating a Slur. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(4). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/semantic.php> ([your date of access]).