ON RETURNING TO MACAO, GREATER CHINA, AND THE MAKING OF CONTEMPORARY POSTCOLONIAL NARRATIVES重返澳門，更強大的中國，以及當代後殖民敘事
The article examines how returns to Macau — simultaneously as place, archive, and symbolic desire — contribute to the elaboration of contemporary postcolonial narratives within the Luso-Portuguese context and that of so-called “Greater China.” Departing from the long European colonial tradition of t...
Saved in:
| Published in: | Review of Culture |
|---|---|
| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Articles |
| Published: |
Instituto Cultural de Macau
2013
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.icm.gov.mo/rc/viewer/pdfViewerParts/40041/2896 |
| Summary: | The article examines how returns to Macau — simultaneously as place, archive, and symbolic desire — contribute to the elaboration of contemporary postcolonial narratives within the Luso-Portuguese context and that of so-called “Greater China.” Departing from the long European colonial tradition of travel accounts, the author shifts the focus from exploration to an “expedition” of restitution: rather than extracting benefits from the colonial enclave, the aim is to restore what would have been “borrowed.” To support this thesis, the article mobilizes a cultural and literary reading of Portuguese works set in Macau and reinterprets the territory’s peculiar status, often described by scholars as a “special” colony, marked by incomplete sovereignty and implicit negotiations with China. Methodologically, the analysis articulates intertextual genealogies (especially the Camonian heritage and its mythologies of symbolic reconstitution) with an examination of circulations of power and affect across cross-border networks (Hong Kong, the Chinese littoral, and beyond). It concludes that the literary reappropriation of the return to Macau produces new narrative configurations: it reorients imperial memory beyond direct domination, shifts the “end of empire” toward an ambiguous discontinuity, and allows an understanding of how postcolonial meanings are constructed in the present, in tension with the contemporary intensification of the China–Portugal bond. |
|---|---|
| ISSN: | 1682-1106 |