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Haunting Imperial Representations into Dialogue: "Os cus de Judas" by António Lobo Antunes and "Waiting for the Barbarians" by J. M. Coetzee

2017; Linguagem: Inglês

10.62791/htgnkq54

2573-1432

Adriana Alves de Paula Martins,

Cultural, Media, and Literary Studies

Abstract: Bearing in mind that the colonial experience decisively influenced the Anglophone and the Lusophone worlds, it is important to consider the literary production of writers from different traditions from a comparative perspective. Their books not only problematize cultural and power structures, but also examine the implications of this process for the construction and transformation of individual and collective identities. In this paper, I propose to compare two books: Os cus de Judas (1979) by António Lobo Antunes and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) by J.M. Coetzee. Both novels discuss relationships of power between the metropolitan centre and the colonial periphery from the perspective of two men working for the colonial enterprise of their native countries in a war context. My aim is to examine how and to what extent the novels, taking the protagonists’ traumatic memories as a starting point, converge on the reflection upon the ambiguous status of colonizers in the colonies, thus proposing conflicting representations of empire, which problematize the transforming and ideologically negotiable condition of individual and collective identities.