THE PORTUGUESE DIASPORA IN THREE CONTEMPORANEOUS LITERATURE NOVELS: POINTS AND COUNTERPOINTS

In O retorno (2011), Dulce Maria Cardoso invite us to know the Rui’s story, a Portuguese Angolan teenager that returned from Angola, together his family. He is compelled to rebuild his life in Continental Portugal, from a precarious and limited financial situation. The scenario was the seventies and the turbulent period of return of more than a half million of Portuguese citizens, during the decolonization of former Portugal overseas territories in Africa. In this paper, we have analyzed the theme of diaspora in the contemporaneous Portuguese Literature, considering as the start point the sociocultural context contained in the book O retorno. Thus, we have established a bridge with two other novels, within a comparative perspective, in order to find similarities or dissimilarities among them, once they address the same theme: Pouca terra...Poucá terra, by Júlia Nery (1984), that brings to the center of the narrative the emigrants story from France, under the approach of a girl called  Leonor, and Livro, by José Luís Peixoto (2012), which has the main focus, among the multiplicity of themes, the emigration scenario from France, and the loving disagreements between two young lovers: Ilídio and Adelaide. The goal is to sketch a viewpoint, clarified by the cultural studies, which conduct us to understand more largely some questions which come by the Dulce Maria Cardoso novel, and also the two other books in question.  They give us the measure of the construction of the contemporaneous Portuguese novel, and reflect the idea of a nation which uses to have a condition of discomfort. This discomfort is proper to who are at the mercy of the diasporic fateful experience, since the most remote past.  

THE CARNAVALIZATION OF ANGOLAN SOCIETY IN “A GERAÇÃO DA UTOPIA”

This research aims to evaluate the changes occurred in the Angolan society, showed on the novel Generation of Utopia, written by Pepetela. This text fictionalizes a long historic period of Angola, since the last years of colonialism until some time after the country's independence and, in this sense, it shows the social changes on this historical / political moment. For this analysis, we use some important concepts used by cultural studies, especially the "Carnivalization", coined by Bakhtin. This process is permeated by inversions and contagions, the noble to the vulgar, high and low, popular and erudite, leaded by the dialog, which produces hybrid forms (also called grotesque). The compreension of most contemporary social transformations is made from "Transformation Metaphors" and, in this sense, one of the most useful is the “Carnivalization” that in the case of the Angolan society, represented by Pepetela, is better understood / evaluated from this bakhtinian concept.

RESISTANCE TO THE COLONIALITY AND COLONIAL SUBSERVIENCE. THE LEGACY OF COLONIALISM IN JORGE BARBOSA AND VIRIATO DA CRUZ AFRICAN POETRY

From the 70's, Africa was a massive wave of independence process. However, such processes are not meant processes of decolonization. According with Fanon (1961) also decolonization is based not only on the territorial and political, but mostly mental. While some former colonies resist colonial hegemony still visible in the local culture, others are colluding with the colonizing process. Thus, it will analyze the subservience and resistance to colonization in Lusophone African poetry, especially with the Angolan Viriato da Cruz, with the poem MaKézú (1961) and Cape Verdian Jorge Barbosa with Prelude (1956).

Contradiction, history and politics in Season of the Rain, by José Eduardo Agualusa

This text analyzes the novel Season of the Rain, from the Angolan Jose Eduardo Agualusa, in which the writer makes use of historical events that occurred in Angola in the period of wars for independence as well as in the following years, showing them under another perspective. The novel is formed by a contradictory, historic and political text,evaluated from the historiographical metafiction concept, as leading the narrative between history and fiction, the author ends up proposing to the readers a new version of facts, by deconstructing myths and national heroes and questioning the value of a so stated independence in a country in ruins.

Materiality to immateriality: analyses of Os transparentes of Ondjaki

The underlying imaginary geographical landscapes account from a certain perception of a nation's identity construction processes. It is what we find in the aesthetic design of Os transparentes the Angolan writer's Ondjaki, a work which you can see the boundaries between the territory and the individual who occupies it through constructions and deconstructions mutual processes. We therefore want to develop interpretive analysis of the relations that link the internal and external influences of characters in intense contact with the place they live in a battered building, located in a city in crisis, Luanda. We will analyze exchanges between the characters of this work, marking the movements of the narrators and text structure, movements point to the many ways to represent the heterogeneous space of cultural influences located in the historical and spatial context of contemporaneity. Therefore, we will use the Rita Chaves studies on the break with the fixity that undertake such characters and also the Tania Macêdo, on the relationship between literature, history and identity Angola. Materiality to immateriality, the work is meant to examine the physical dematerialization experienced by the protagonist, along the plot, highlighting a closer relationship between this process and the deterioration of the city, metonymic situation that may be related to poor stability as it flies to national identity Angola.

Assessment of Intercultural Communicative Competence of Lusophone Teachers

International mobility programs and curriculum restructuration stand out as the most common practice to develop intercultural communicative competence of students, in quest of respect for diversity in its otherness. For the teacher in initial and continuing training, the aim is to train in order to deal with children, adolescents and young adults, forming the growing migration around the world. Interested in the profile of Portuguese-speaking teachers for intercultural education, we address the professionals of Angolan nationality who were present at the Fórum Juventude Europa – Lusofonia, in its issue of Coimbra 2014. With methods in line with the proposal of Schaefer (2014), we assess the ability of Knowledge Discovery, Empathy, Respect for Otherness, Tolerance for Ambiguity, Behavioral Flexibility and Communicative Awareness. In this article, we present and discuss the findings of the group of teachers from Angola based on the literature of cultural studies and emphasis on intercultural communicative competence. The considerations which allow us to analyze are around the actual limits of the subjects - in this case pre-service and in-service teachers - to signify the symbiotic nature of the relationship among themselves, the others and the world.