Impossible dialogues in post times: geographical locations and identities in José Saramago and Ruy Duarte de Carvalho

Abstract

The following lines draw an imaginary dialogue between the theoretical dimension of the idea of national identity proposed by José Saramago’s reflection after Portugal’s entry into the European Economic Community, and the reflection of the writer and anthropologist Ruy Duarte de Carvalho presented in works that have as their center the cultural universe of the Kuvale world of southern Angola, written largely during the years of civil war that occurred after the country’s national independence. By questioning, rethinking and trying to rebalance the relationship between centers and margins of an idea of common, both authors seek a way to imagine a new self-placement, capable of re-signifying the idea of the failure of the imperial relationship as well as the failure of an idea of a macro- cephalic Nation that seems to ignore the parts that make up the national body itself. It is on this basis that I intend to reflect on the terms of Saramago’s trans-Iberista proposal, creating a (impossible) dialogue with the idea of continentality as an overcoming of the colonial narrative and the knowledge produced in Ruy Duarte’s writing.