The Worlds of Mia Couto

Mia Couto has been recognised internationally as one of the most important African authors of our times. His rapidly growing opus shifts fluidly between various modes of writing, mixing historical elements with poetic and autobiographic ones, in often unpredictable and intellectually challenging ways. With each new book, the writer multiplies various original wor(l)ds, creating new challenges for his readers. Each of Couto's texts opens up a rhizomic world which in turn contains (an)other world(s), inviting us to review and adjust our earlier interpretations of his oeuvre as a whole.

In The Worlds of Mia Couto a diverse group of literary experts sets out to explore Mia Couto's oeuvre in relation not only to the imaginary worlds created by the author but also to the complex geographical, cultural and literary contexts that are woven into the texture of his work. While Couto has increasingly received scholarly attention, the international connections and connectivities of his work have been largely neglected so far. This book endeavours to show that Couto's work can be read beyond its particular Mozambican and Lusophone context by paying attention to the broader African and global literary contexts, including Latin America, Asia and Europe. Mia Couto's work is, for instance, of particular interest for rethinking, from the margins, established concepts of «World Literature», «globalisation» and the «postcolonial». The various chapters of The Worlds of Mia Couto focus thus on some of the - often unexpected - international connections across his fictional and non-fictional work beyond the Lusophone literary space, crossing cultural, linguistic and gender boundaries.

Auteur

Kristian Van Haesendonck is an Associate Professor and Researcher at the Language and Culture Research Center, University of Sanya (P.R.C.). He specialises in comparative Spanish American, postcolonial Caribbean and Lusophone African literatures. He taught comparative Latin American and postcolonial Caribbean literatures and cultures at universities in the Netherlands (Leiden), Belgium (Antwerp, Ghent), Portugal (Lisbon), Sweden (Växjö) and the United States (Princeton, Villanova). He is the author of Postcolonial Archipelagos: Essays on Hispanic Caribbean and Lusophone African Literatures (Peter Lang) and Encanto o espanto? Identidad y nación en la novela puertorriqueña actual (Vervuert-Iberoamericana), and editor of Going Caribbean! New Perspectives on Caribbean Literature and Art (Humus) and Caribbeing: Comparing Caribbean Literatures and Cultures (Rodopi).

Contenu

Contents: Kristian Van Haesendonck: Introduction: Mia Couto, from Mozambique to the World - Worlding Mia Couto - Paulo de Medeiros: Mia Couto and the Antinomies of World-Literature - David Brookshaw: From Nation to Imagination: Mia Couto and Language in a Comparative Perspective - Ewa A. Lukaszyk: Mia Couto and his African Context: Invention of an Origin - Peter J. Maurits: Worlds of Mia Couto: The Aesthetic of the Global - Mia Couto's Worlds - Kamila Krakowska Rodrigues: Literary Ethnographies: The Idea of Nation and Writing Back in Terra Sonâmbula and Macunaíma - Irene Marques: Female Resistance and Engagement in Combating Intersecting Powers of Colonialisms and Patriarchies in Mia Couto's Woman of the Ashes - Celina Martins: Under the Frangipani by Mia Couto: Myth and Poetics of Relation - Fernanda Vilar: The Ghosts of Ngungunyane: Constructing an Ambivalent Hero - Mixing Wor(l)ds - Kristian Van Haesendonck: An Interview with Mia Couto.