THE POWER OF THE STORY ON POSTCOLONIAL FICTION THE NOVELS OF BRIAN CASTRO AND MIA COUTO后殖民小說情節的能量：比昂‧卡斯特羅和米亞‧古都的長篇小說
The article examines the "energy" of plot and the act of narrating in post-colonial fiction, arguing that competing stories—rather than merely the valorization of orality—reveal social and political dynamics that resist essentialism. Drawing on Richard Kearney's formulations concerning the power of...
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| Published in: | Review of Culture |
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| Format: | Articles |
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Instituto Cultural de Macau
January 2005
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| Online Access: | https://www.icm.gov.mo/rc/viewer/pdfViewerParts/40013/2326 |
| Summary: | The article examines the "energy" of plot and the act of narrating in post-colonial fiction, arguing that competing stories—rather than merely the valorization of orality—reveal social and political dynamics that resist essentialism. Drawing on Richard Kearney's formulations concerning the power of narratives to shape fragmented events and produce communal identity, as well as Michael Jackson's distinction between canonical stories that reinforce boundaries and narrative practices that dissolve or transgress them, the author proposes that the apparent tension between collective cohesion and individual difference can be productive, and is verifiable in two literary cases.
Methodologically, the text brings Brian Castro and Mia Couto into dialogue through a comparative and contextualized reading, articulating narrative poetics with biographical trajectories marked by cultural "in-betweenness" and processes of decolonization. The works analyzed evince procedures of self-invention, identity ambiguity, and reconfiguration of national and linguistic belongings, refusing stories "imposed from above" and opening space for multiple points of view. The conclusion is that, in Castro and Couto, storytelling functions simultaneously as a mechanism of meaning-making and as a critique of totalizing categories, transforming narrative into a device of resistance and rewriting of the post-colonial. |
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| ISSN: | 1682-1106 |