E3W Literature | University of Texas

Luís Madureira
Imaginary Geographies in Portuguese and Lusophone-African Literature: Narratives of Discovery and Empire
Edwin Mellen Press, 2006
298 pages
$119.95

Reviewed by Lanie Millar

Luís Madureira’s Imaginary Geographies in Portuguese and Lusophone-African Literature, like the Portuguese empire that is its subject, encompasses a huge chronological and geographical breadth of literary, cultural, historical and theoretical texts. Beginning with the oft-considered inauguration of Portugal’s and Europe’s modern era in the fifteenth century, Madureira argues that the Portuguese empire’s “impending death” was inherently part of its expansionist project from the fifteenth century onwards. The text passes from an extensive discussion of key 16th century travel narratives (including Vasco da Gama’s, João de Castro’s and Fernão Mendes Pinto’s voyages to Africa and Asia, as well as sixteenth-century poet Luís de Camões’s Os Lusíadas) to twentieth century African novels about the dissolution of Portugal’s control over its former overseas colonies. Madureira constructs his argument over the entire course of the modern empire, convincingly making the transition from the 16th to the 20th century in order to examine how Portugal developed a concept of empire wherein its empirical and epistemological center was at the margins of its reach rather than in its underdeveloped metropolis.

Imaginary Geographies begins with an introduction, and then is divided into three chapters, each with three or four subsections.The introduction and first chapter set out Madureira’s central argument through 16th century travel narratives, contending that these texts record the structure and modern origins of Portugal’s imperial project. The subsequent two chapters deal with novels set in Angola by Portuguese authors João de Melo and António Lobo Antunes, as well as Mozambican writer Mia Couto’s extensive narrative production. Madureira begins his introduction by positing that his book is about Portugal’s failed search for a history, failed because “the trouble with Portugal lay…in the fact that their history happened overseas.” This is a convincing beginning to a text that is principally concerned with analyzing the failures of the Portuguese empire as a whole (as evidenced in colonial wars and the independent national governments that followed), rather than arguing for the literary or ideological independence of the colonies.

The first chapter does not simply argue that imperial Portugal was, in the words of Todorov, a “Eurocentric” power during the “age of discovery.” It suggests that the very notion of “discovery” reveals a European consciousness that was structured around a hermeneutical project of uncovering the “unknown” in the world—but an “unknown” in the global trade system including the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Madureira adeptly demonstrates that Europe’s ideology of imperial manifest destiny was deeply influenced by this global trade system, suggesting that Portugal sought to emulate models drawn from the great Asian, Middle Eastern and African empires of the 13th through 15th centuries as it built its own trade empires. Thus the “unknown” represented by the non-European parts of the world is revealed as the “known” from afar, in the margins of the Portuguese empire.

Arguing against conceptions of Portugal as a key colonial player, Madureira posits that Portugal lacked the land power to adequately defend its outposts and the economic power to make a major impact on the world market of the 14th to 16th centuries. He supports this argument via examples like Vasco da Gama’s failure to impress the kings of Calcutta with his goods of substandard quality—evidence for how far behind the Asian kingdoms Portugal lay, as well as for da Gama’s recognition of this lack. Further, the book argues that Portugal’s was an empire of “margins,” based on mapping its own limits rather than on solidifying and consolidating a metropolitan center. The Portuguese empire, as Madureira amply evidences through Castro’s and Camões’ texts, never truly achieved the imperial hegemony that it imagined for itself epistemologically, economically or politically. An apt example that Madureira makes use of is Pinto’s rendering of the Chinese Middle Kingdom as the mirror reversal of the Portuguese kingdom—Pinto characterizes China as orderly, just and vast. Madureira proposes that the text reveals an anxiety about the Portuguese colonial project that continues into the 20th century, suggesting that its depiction of China represents what “amounts to an acknowledgement…that European hegemony may well turn out to be an historical flash in the pan…it signals the emergence of an inaugural aporia—a dehiscence—in the ‘long story’ of European modernity.”

Imaginary Geographies thus argues for an intriguing reconfiguration of traditional narratives of Portugal’s colonial self-image, replacing the idea of the hegemonic world power with Portugal’s self-recognition of its own “metropolitan backwardness,” which sets the stage for the transition to Chapter Two’s discussion of the Estado Novo period (1933-68) during António de Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorship and the subsequent fall of the empire. The transition between the 17th and 20th centuries is smoothly bridged by Madureira’s case that the Estado Novo’s rhetoric represents an attempt to recapture the colonial success and historical trajectory of the “age of discovery,” and that this desire ultimately reflects itself in novelistic depictions of the end of the empire. Madureira draws an apt connection between Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) and Hegel’s notion of universal history, arguing that Marlow’s journey is one that reveals the “timeless” and “ahistorical” brutality of colonial conquest. By exploring the margins of the creation of the narrative of European history, Marlow, like the authors of the end of the Portuguese empire, discovers the end of History, of Western modernity. This is the mission not only of individuals, but of the Portuguese metropolis; Madureira draws nimble parallels between the images of conquest of the earlier travel texts and the rhetoric of Salazar’s reconfiguration of the colonies as “Portugal overseas.”

For example, Madureira argues that in Melo’s Autópsia de um mar em ruínas (“Autopsy of a sea in ruins,” 1984) the novel’s Portuguese narrator fighting Angolan guerillas in the wars for independence of the 1960s and ‘70s imagines himself (and therefore the empire) as occupying the land of the dead. This “spectral” end of the world is a place where events repeat themselves and time and history never advance. Similarly, the third chapter argues for a vision of a post-nation in Mozambique in Couto’s fiction, rather than for an idealistic national project. According to the text, such a nationalistic vision would be impossible as a product of a Portuguese colonial power, which lacked a center and modeled its own history on other global empires.

Madureira’s initial argument for the marginal foundations of the Portuguese empire is particularly well-constructed, and the book is a convincing analysis of the Portuguese concept of its imperial power. However, the third chapter creates a trajectory from the two Portuguese novelists writing about Angola to Couto writing about his native Mozambique that seems to suggest a vision not entirely congruent with the title’s construction of “Lusophone-African literature” as separate from Portuguese literature. Madureira perhaps needs to consider Couto’s post-independence writing within a category of “post-Portuguese literature” that records the reverberations of colonialism, and to explore this proposed literary genealogy more thoroughly in the final chapter.

However, aside from this single criticism, Madureira’s text is a well-written and innovative account of the “imaginary geographies” of the Portuguese empire, and its strength lies in its panoramic vision of the development of the empire. By establishing the roots for his argument firmly in the texts of the early stages of Portugal’s imperial imaginary, Madureira bolsters his suggestion that the literatures that reflect the end of the imperial project record and respond to the specific historical problems of Portugal rather than occupying the space of a “generic” post-colonial literature. This is a book that would be of importance to anyone interested in early modern European literature as well as contemporary postcolonial, especially African, literatures. In Imaginary Geographies, Madureira provides a well-argued and provocative reading of the concept of empire.