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Um novo livro que sairá à rua dentro de algumas semanas. É prefaciado por Onésimo T. Almeida, um de très editores da série na Editora Sussex, no Reino Unido.
Preface
In the Lusophone world, outside Portugal itself, the first emergence of a national consciousness occurred in Brazil. However, it was long after the independence from Portugal in 1822 that Brazilian literature turned more inwards, becoming less concerned with the aesthetic mandates of the former motherland and paying more attention to its local surroundings. In the 1930s, the echoes of the nascent Brazilian literary autonomy reached Cape Verde. Then, a group of local authors started the publication of Claridade, a literary magazine that quickly became the vehicle for a new outlook and a theoretical perspective, conceived along Brazilian identity lines. From then on, the core belief amongst these writers was that literature produced in the islands should reflect life in the archipelago since Cape Verde was far from being a mere extension of Portugal and its culture. What followed was the birth of a singular and rich body of literary works now widely accepted under the coined expression of Cape Verdean Literature.
Soon afterwards these new literary winds reached the Azores. Even though the Azorean islands were always conceived as part of Portugal, since their inhabitants were transplanted Portuguese, its inhabitants exhibited a long-held sense of difference and specificity. This sense of separation had been gaining ground from the end of the 19th century; the 1940s saw that sentiment full-fledged, fostering the incremental growth of an impressive literary corpus that is unique in the context of contemporary Portuguese literature.
Brianna Medeiros offers us the first book-length study of these two literatures in comparative terms. What the present volume offers is, in fact, a full glance at life and culture in both archipelagos – Cape Verde now an independent nation, and the Azores an Autonomous Region of Portugal. The reader travels through the works of Azorean writers such as, among others, Vitorino Nemésio, Pedro da Silveira, Dias de Melo, and João de Melo, as well as their Cape Verdean counterparts – Baltazar Lopes, Manuel Lopes, Orlanda Amarílis, and Germano Almeida. Both archipelagos are part of what geographers call Macaronesia (there are two other archipelagos – Portuguese Madeira and the Canary Islands, an Autonomous Region of Spain), sharing significant similarities, as well as striking differences. For example, each archipelago is composed of nine inhabited islands, the distinction being that Cape Verde’s ten islands include one that is little more than a floating desert. Nevertheless, these are mere starting points for the descriptive journey set out by the hand of a highly informed author, through the writings produced in these beautiful and fascinating Atlantic archipelagos, usually, and unfortunately, forgotten in the studies of Portugal and of the Portuguese-speaking world.
The reader is in for a pleasant surprise to receive a wealth of new information on the history and culture of these two small, yet immensely rich island worlds. The Eruption of Insular Identities greatly enhances the academic breadth of the series, and as editors we are pleased to see this work published by Sussex Academic Press.
