O pós-colonial entre Norte e Sul: formulações teóricas, implicações políticas na batalha pela ‘arma da teoria

In the field of critique of African literatures written in Portuguese, the relevance of the postcolonial as a mode of interpretation is a contentious issue. When it comes to a critique that proclaims from the semi/peripheral spaces of Portugal and Brazil, the suspicion regarding the postcolonial is based on an experience of subalternity which, in global terms, is inherent to an experience of the South – whether of South America or of Southern Europe – that marks the center-periphery relations it establishes with the North. When experienced as “a [predominantly Anglophone and Northern] theory” or “academic field” an engagement with the postcolonial from the South seems to entail a positioning that is in itself political. This is because it is a reaction to what can be perceived as possible continuations, in the epistemological field, of the colonial logic. Still, how far is the postcolonial actually a perspective solely inherent to the Global North? How does the emphasis on a Portuguese postcolonialism not re-enact in the current transnational space of Portuguese speakers the same center-periphery relation it contests in the global arena? It is by raising these and other questions that this paper gets to grips with the controversy about the relevance of the postcolonial to the analysis of African literatures written in Portuguese.