Ruy Duarte de Carvalho’s Neo-Animist Project: An African Approach to Posthumanism

Alice Girotto

doi:10.30687/tol/2499-5975/2020/22/029

Abstract

The literary project of the Angolan writer Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, from the collection of poems Chão de oferta (1972) to the metafictional trilogy Os filhos de Próspero (2009), along with his work as an anthropologist, filmmaker and intellectual, is animated by a research for a conjunction between subject, geology, landscape and politics, which rejects Western epistemological categories and their underlying powers. At the end of his life, this trait of his personality and work took the form of an unfinished neo-animist project, based on a decalogue in which he criticises the humanist paradigm for the sake of recovering an “equilibrium politics” relying on “[o]ther paradigms set aside and hidden from consideration because they originate in cultures dominated or annihilated by the Western world”. The aim of this essay is both to trace the origins of Carvalho’s neo-animist project in his early poetry and narrative and connect it with a broader African criticism, both literary and philosophical, in order to include his thought within the African approach to posthumanism.

Highlights

Alice Girotto Ruy Duarte De Carvalho’s Neo-Animist Project: An African Approach to Posthumanism. With these words he highlighted a common thread underlying his whole literary project, first as a poet and as a novelist, and his own life and work as an anthropologist, filmmaker and intellectual, that is a restless research for a conjunction between subject, geology, landscape and politics, which, in a postcolonial fashion, rejects Western epistemological categories and the powers they are the mirror of (Carvalho 2019)
A hybrid subject, but in the opposite direction in comparison with the hybridity postulated by Bhabha (1994): Ruy Alberto Duarte Gomes de Carvalho (1941-2010) was born in Portugal and moved to Angola with his family in his early childhood, being among the more than 170,000 Portuguese that between 1945 and 1960 emigrated there, pushed by the colonization politics of the Salazarist regime and attracted by the growing wealth produced by the coffee-driven economy of the colony (Castelo 2007, 177)
It is precisely in this context that his metafictional trilogy Os filhos de Próspero (2009) was born and is mainly set – a ‘South in the South’ which is not surprisingly and programmatically the subject of the poem that opened his career as a writer4 and the geography to which he definitively and irreversibly consecrated himself since, at least, the ’70s

Summary

Introduction

With these words he highlighted a common thread underlying his whole literary project, first as a poet and as a novelist, and his own life and work as an anthropologist, filmmaker and intellectual, that is a restless research for a conjunction between subject, geology, landscape and politics, which, in a postcolonial fashion, rejects Western epistemological categories and the powers they are the mirror of (Carvalho 2019).

Results

Conclusion