Caio Simões de Araújo (Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra)
In the last decades, the interest in Postcolonial Studies and all the complex questions it brings to discussion has deeply increased. Nevertheless, “Postcolonialism” as a “theory”, in its mainstream version, has been developed taking into account colonialism and its dynamics in the way it was formulated, applied and experienced in the context of British Imperialism. In this paper, we will be particularly interested in pointing out how “Postcolonialism” may be a floating concept that cannot be used interchangeably as a pattern of reference for all the geo-political contexts in which colonial power took place. On the contrary, we acknowledge, with Boaventura de Souza Santos, the need for a “localized Postcolonialism” that is aware of the complexity of the postcolonial world(s) produced by particular forms of colonial relations. As Gustavo Lins Ribeiro argues, in the Latin American case, one may think about a “Postimperial condition” in which North-American informal domination may be more significant for the subaltern inscription of the continent in the world-system than the previous exercise of European colonial power. We will, then, try to map the historical, political and cultural specificities of different patterns of colonialism (Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and British) and the complexity of postcolonial condition(s) in Latin America and the Caribbean. As a central concern, we remark the question if whether or not Latin American and the Caribbean share a same sense of “Postcoloniality”. To answer this fundamental question, we will turn back to Latin American and Caribbean cultural and literary criticism of the twentieth century, focusing in the concepts of transculturation, hybridism, magical realism (or, better saying, marvellous realism) and carnivalization. We assume that a proper reading of this debates may help us in this hard and many times ambiguous work of mapping the political and complex cartography of this “floating concept”.
