Império, identidade e subalternidade: uma análise pós-colonial de O velho e o mar, de Ernest Hemingway

Abstract

This research aims to develop a study of the novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952) by the North-American Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) through a post-colonial slant. For this purpose, it will be considered the United States neo-imperialist context in Cuba, more precisely in the first half of the 20th century, period when this work was written and, from this aspect, it is assigned to the study an original nature of the perspective adopted to the novel. The use of the post-colonial theory for this study is justified due to its importance in the cross cultural studies, mainly when its concepts are applied in literature, promoting a reflection about the subalternity, condition attributed by the colonial power to the colonized people. Ernest Hemingway’s literature, in addition to contain an expansive critical resource, is an option to the observance of the text through this study line, since his narratives express aspects of neocolonialism. Thus, with the analytical method, it will be observed some fictional elements in The Old Man and the Sea through the post-colonialism, namely: the North-American and Cuban neo-colonial relations in the plot, the definition of the characters´s identities the Cuban culture presenting local spaces as determinant factors to condition of subalternity and elements of the North-American and the Cuban Cultures presented in the literary text as a result of the antagonism between Empire and colony. Therefore, the theoretical contributions of Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (1989, 2007), Boehmer (2005), Bonnici (2000, 2005), Memmi (2007), Spivak (2010), among others, will be fundamental to the production of this study, considering the reading of the corpus as a representation of the singularity of the subalternized, determined by the United States over the colonized Cuban.