Between nation, post-empire, and world-literature

Abstract

African Lusophone literatures are largely a Portuguese product: the very construction of literary corpora though book editing and printing was mainly led by Portuguese publishers before and after independence. Other non-African institutions (universities, literary agents, critics) were largely responsible for that process of canonization in the Portuguese-speaking world, with repercussions in Africa itself.In the worlding of these already constituted African literary archives through translation, the grip of European agencies is even stronger: more than half of the published translation passes through the mediation of a single, Frankfurt-based literary agency. More than half of these books were funded by a translation support programme paid for by the Portuguese state.In this state of affairs, this article wishes to carry out a reflection on the institutional situation in which such literatures are produced, appear in book form and travel inside and outside the Portuguese-language literary space(s). It is my opinion, following and adapting Pascale Casanova’s suggestion, that a single literary work, in this specific case, can assume a threefold position: a national one, a specific position inside the Portuguese-language literary space and, finally, a world-literary one, thus oscillating between the dimension of nation-state, the post-imperial language community and the World Republic of Letters.I will resort to two case studies, exemplary of two divergent trajectories: José Eduardo Agualusa, possibly the most resonant example of internationalisation of an Angolan author; and João Melo, which appears to have a stronger national positioning and a much weaker international one.