June 5, 2023

Post-Colonialisms and Global Citizenship

António Sousa Ribeiro

This doctoral dissertation studies the "body in transit" or "body by the sea" Pathosformel in a set of contemporary literary works produced in the Greater Caribbean and the African Indian Ocean. The main objective of this research is to investigate the narrative and poetic strategies with which this body is shown to us in its condition of liminal presence, of between-place, never fixed to a single identity positioning in two cultural areas that have experienced in a specific way different historical colonial and post-colonial processes.

With the methodological tools of contemporary visual studies and art history, which have revalued the work of Warburgian and Benjaminian studies of images, and postcolonial theory, we trace the condition of presence and meaning that makes this formula a critical image, the different types of gazes that narrators, characters or speakers refer to this body, the affects with which such gazes are charged, and the way in which such staging restores the bodies represented from the historical violence to which they have been exposed through a "compassionate gaze".

With the resource of montage we bring together the stories "El ahogado más hermoso del mundo" (1968) by Gabriel García Márquez, "O hotel das duas portas" (2005) by João Paulo Borges Coelho, the poem "Vejez" (1996) by Márgara Russotto and the long poem Janela para Oriente (1999) by Eduardo White where this Pathosformel has a singular presence with no less important political meanings, we corroborate that it is possible to develop a comparative study between the literatures of particular geo-political and cultural areas that eschews the frequent categories of postcolonial studies or what Paulo de Medeiros calls "the fetishes" of postcolonial criticism.

Key Words: Pathosformel; Critical image; Emotions; Body in transit; Compassion