Vendendo passados: construções de Angola a partir da obra de José Eduardo Agualusa (1996-2009)

Abstract

This work seeks to understand how the national spaceness in Angola was constructed and/or desconstructed throught the works of angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa (1960-). Agualusa is one of the most important novelists of today Angola, and his works is published in dozen of countries around the world, showing how the range and the strength of his work in the literary field is huge. Literature is a strong weapom in the construction of the nations and their rescpective national identities, acting as a important factor in the act of imagine the nation as a comunity. Literary works can, also, build geographies from his lines. That’s the perspective which this work seeks to understand how the nation of Angola was imaginated and her geography delinead in the literary corpus of one of the most proeminent writers, and how this space conflicts or approaches of another formulation of the Angolan nation, like the perspective of intellectuals close to the leading party, the MPLA, or the views of another intellectuals and literary artists. It seeks to analyze the novels Estação das Chuvas (Rainy Season), published in 1996, O Vendedor de Passador (The Book of Chamaleons), published in 2004, and Barroco Tropical, published in 2009. And from the reading of these works and the comparison with other sources and productions dealing with the period, understand how the themes of memory, the forgetfulness, history and identity contribute to the construction of the Angolan national space and how José Eduardo Agualusa is an actor in this scenario.