Code   .  2023.07812.CEECIND
Start   .   2024
Duration   .  72 months
Principal Investigator   .   Daniela Spina

Institutions

Funding Entity

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia

Research Unit

CHAM — Centre for the Humanities

Coordinating Institution

Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas / Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Through a study that intersects literary theory and history, this research proposal aims to compare how colonial youth represented itself in periodical press and how it was later represented in novels and short stories published after the end of European colonialisms in East Africa and South Asia. Taking as an object of study fiction and press from former colonies of European empires in the Indian Ocean, like Sri Lanka, Goa (India), Mozambique, and Zanzibar (Tanzania), the project wants to explore the intervention of young intellectuals in the public space, especially regarding education and problems of cultural concern. At the same time, periodicals will be studied in counterpoint with postcolonial fiction having young people as its main characters or as narrators, paying special attention to the coming-of-age novel. The project reflects on how young agents envisioned postcolonial futures and on the subsequent interpretations of these visions, including representations of hope, deception, and failures. The focus on East Africa and South Asia is justified by the fact that most European colonial experiences in those territories ended by the mid-20th century, and early postcolonial times were largely influenced by the same international political and cultural currents. The timeframe 1930-1970 refers to the historical period when the periodicals in question were published, while in the case of the fictional works, it doesn’t refer to their date of publication, but to the timespan in which the plots are set. This difference is justified by the fact that the project attempts to frame a complex vision of colonial youth, making the link between intellectual action in a determined time and later perceptions of cultural phenomena. Set in World Literature, the project will engage in recent debates on the global circulation of specific textual forms and contribute to filling the gap of studies on postcolonial coming-of-age literature. It privileges an interdisciplinary approach, using methodological tools taken from narratology to read fiction and discourse analysis for the periodicals’ papers, while engaging in a reflection on literary and textual genres and the disciplinary boundaries in which these are enclosed.

Objectivos

My main objectives are: 1) to portray an encompassing picture of the colonial youth. Colonial youth has to be intended as an ensemble of subjects between adolescence and young adulthood who lived, or were born, in territories enclosed in colonial empires, whose education and cultural background were influenced by ideologies and habits from outside: the ones imposed by the colonial power, through institutional plans of education and cultural actions, and the ideas brought by other foreigner political agents, such as the Soviet Union, which strongly influenced postcolonial transition from colony to statehood in East Africa and South Asia. The focus on literature will allow me to work at the level of later representations. On the other side, studying texts published in the press broadens our understanding of the youth’s engagement in the public debate, especially in issues of their concern – such as leisure, education, girlhood, and emancipation –, being an opportunity to reflect on instances of selfrepresentation and ways to envision postcolonial futures. 2) In treating novels, short stories, and journalistic texts with the same methodological tools drawn from literary theory, my secondary goal is to overcome disciplinary boundaries and opening to a new reflection on studying journalism as a narrative genre, taking into consideration the fact that, in many colonial contexts, journalism has opened the path to literature and, sometimes and to some extent, substituted it. While chronicles are already considered a narrative text, other textual forms of intervention in the press are often excluded from literary studies. Accordingly, close reading and other techniques grounded in narratology will be employed to read the selected texts. 3) In putting together literary texts from different literary systems – whether national or not –, written in different languages, I want to challenge area studies, an approach in which the Portuguese Humanities are deeply embedded. I want to engage in current debates set in World Literature, namely, on the necessity of addressing textuality as the unifying thread of literature, through the authors’ discourses and the common ideas on the world that their texts disclose. For this reason, I will also adopt in my project concepts from the history of ideas, while I will also pay attention to the circulation of specific textual forms across empires.