This new methodological stance seeks to contribute to a break with the politics of silence which always descended on that which was deemed as being “non-canonical,” and for that reason was removed to the margins of what hegemonic literary culture hallowed and still hallows. Now new negotiations emerge with a bearing on meaning in the area of contemporary literary studies, as a predictable outcome of their dialogue with cultural studies. This applies as much to the literature produced in Europe, it too brimming with perplexities, confrontations and erasures, as it does to the artistic manifestations of the dominated peoples, who from the start were excluded from the literate universe.ĥSuch issues gain even more theoretical-critical weight at the present time when literary and cultural studies find themselves in an in-between space created by the porousness of their previously significantly rigid frontiers. The study of these literatures is greatly enhanced by considering Lusism and Lusophony in relation to each other, showing the clashes that arose from the construction of the Portuguese-language cultural space. Lusism and Lusophony ultimately become important focal points for researchers who choose such literatures as their research areas.
It is through them that, in the case of European literature, the diverse euphoric and dysphoric moments of Lusism are played out and the other literatures also show the serious clashes engaged in by the different cultures which were subdued in the process of seizing unknown peoples and lands, always following the dictates of the political‑economic project of overseas expansion. Lusism and Lusophony intersect, the latter being the destination of the former.ĤIn turn, the literatures produced in Portuguese ultimately become a tool of cultural dissemination. In this process of expansion, the Portuguese language gained other subjects who “speak it, speaking of themselves in it,” as Eduardo Lourenço puts it (2001: 123), and for this very reason it became one of the main threads in the weaving of the fabric of the new ethno-cultural web which thus emerged.ģThe sea, by then made Portuguese, as much by the concrete historical given as by the imaginative route represented at first by the aesthetic efficacy of Camões’s epic, becomes the main route of this identitary trajectory in the process of expanding, by which, more so than the language, an entire imaginary was disseminated. The Portuguese language was – and is – the cultural element which was made into one of the main foundations of the identitary constructions in the European space as well as of the sedimentation of what we can consider as being the web of differences which was and is woven in the colonised countries where it became either the national tongue, or the official language.Ģ Following this imaginary trajectory, built up by the ethical, historical and cultural body of Lusitanity, two symbolic constructs are arrived at: Lusism, interpreted as something which spills over from the linguistic domain to become a way of affirming itself in the European space, and Lusophony, which emerged in the wake of the expansion of the language and culture beyond Europe, when both were disseminated among peoples of different origins in America, Africa and even parts of Asia and Oceania. Portuguese-language literary production captures this trajectory, from the point of view of both – it is fair to say – its “luminous” affirmation and its problematic aspects, as well as in its collision with the ethno‑cultural differences of the non-European peoples whose symbolic matrices coloniality (Mignolo, 2003) sought to elide.