Il Tolomeo Rivista di studi postcoloniali | A Postcolonial Studies Journal | Journal d’études postcoloniales | Revista de estudos pós-coloniais

Rivista | Il Tolomeo
Fascicolo monografico | 22 | 2020
Articolo | Ruy Duarte de Carvalho’s Neo-Animist Project: An African Approach to Posthumanism

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

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.


Open access | Peer reviewed

Presentato: 15 Luglio 2020 | Accettato: 11 Settembre 2020 | Pubblicato 22 Dicembre 2020 | Lingua: en

Keywords Ecology of knowledgesAngolan literatureRuy Duarte de CarvalhoSouthern epistemologiesPosthumanismNeo-animism


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