Ironia, intertextualidade e narradores-personagens excêntricos nas metaficções historiográficas de José Eduardo Agualusa: uma leitura das obras Nação crioula e A rainha Ginga

Abstract

This work aims to demonstrate that the writing of José Eduardo Agualusa represents to two forms of resistance: the first appears in opposition to the historiographical discourse produced by Portuguese colonizers, which, based on the official history of the colonization of Africa, intended to justify exploratory practices; the second form questions and denounces the distortions of the post-independence Angolan nationalist discourse, which, with the justification of fighting the injustices of the colonizer, persecuted those who disagreed with its practices. To achieve this goal, our corpus of analysis are the historiographic metafiction novels “Nação Crioula: correspondência secreta de Fradique Mendes” (1997) and “A Rainha Ginga: e de como os africanos inventaram o mundo” (2014). The two novels were selected due to the fact that both establish a dialogue with official historiography and problematize the colonization and enslavement processes that took place in Brazil and Angola. Having clarified our central goal, we defend, in this research, that José Eduardo Agualusa uses historiographical metafiction novels to develop criticisms of the cultural essentialisms propagated by the Angolan nationalist discourses and by the oppressive strategies employed by Portugal during the colonial period. The author uses this literary form strategically, as it allows re-discussing official history from literature and establishes a dialogue between reality/fiction in a critical and ironic way. In order to reach the proposed goal and defend the hypothesis formulated here, the research was organized in four chapters, which are based on the theoretical contributions of selected thinkers. Among them, the following stand out: Albuquerque Júnior (2007); Bastos (2007); Bhabha (1998); Bonnici (2000); Chiappini (2007); Costa Lima (1989); Decca (1997); Esteves (2010); Glissant (2005); Hutcheon (1991 and 2000); Hall (2003); Pesavento (2006); Ricoeur (1994) Shohat; and Stam (1996); White (1992). Anchored in this theoretical framework, we developed the thesis based on a methodology that consists of the analysis of the plots of these texts by Agualusa.