Postcolonial Archipelagos: Essays on Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone African Fiction, by Kristian Van Haesendonck
Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: An ambitious study that seeks through a comparative approach to tease out various points of convergence between a variety of linguistic and cultural traditions, Postcolonial Archipelagos is framed along three principal theoretical axes: the archipelago, conviviality, and creolization.Kristian Van Haesendonck posits the archipelago as a space for conflict, a plea for impurity, and a metaphor for tolerance and resilience.For him, conviviality is partly an attempt to adopt literary studies to a changing world, and to forge an alternative way of living together in which conflict is seen as inevitable but not necessarily destructive.There is always a productiveness to the tensions of conviviality.He argues that creoleness is a "natural condition" toward which postcolonial subjects strive (p.55).The book offers a range of readings of theorists and producers of culture from Africa and the Caribbean, and attempts to build conceptual bridges between architecture, urban studies, postcolonial theory, and literature, as part of an effort "to think in archipelagic modes" (p.43), which for Van Haesendonck implies attempting to connect the unconnectable in an inflection of the heterogeneity that constitutes identity and, more generally, the human condition.Invoking the late Patrick Chabal, who challenged us to stop reading Portugueselanguage literature from the continent as a discrete unit, Van Haesendonck attempts to bring into dialogue work from Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean more widely, both in situ and in diaspora.He studies
Author: Phillip Rothwell
Institution: University of Oxford
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2993663883