Call for papers SOLETRAS n. 42 2021-2

Editors of the issue: Maria de Fátima Fernandes – Universidade Pública de Cabo Verde (UNICV); Norma Sueli Rosa Lima – Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ); Simone Caputo Gomes – Universidade de São Paulo (USP)

Dossier: Feeling/being apart, establishing bridges: island tendencies in the literature of Cape Verde

Based on concepts such as rhizome, transit and transarea, Simone Caputo Gomes, then, defines the contemporary Cape Verdean literature: “a world-literature to a world-homeland”. On the path of the poem “Signo Identitário”, by Oswaldo de Osório, understands Cape Verde as a bridge between identities: “Geographically and sentimentally Africa and demographically and culturally mestizos we have neither to be Europeans nor more or less Africans. We do have to know, though, how to live together, in a Cape Verdean way, in this wide Atlantic which surrounds us and to which we early serve as a bridge of identities” (OSÓRIO, 2007, p. 79).         

So, how are we supposed to think about the Cape Verdean’s Literature in the face of an adrift world? And how do we build this island belonging, archipelagic, and at the same time diasporic, in a homeland erected by elements and external factors to an inhabited land found in 1460 and colonized by Portuguese? “A between-world-homeland seems to line up with the idea of a between-world-writings, a traveler literature, of contact, of exchanges, of movements, hybrid and post-colonial, which questions hegemonic paradigms and transcends borders and boundaries of geographic, generic and temporal orders”, argues Gomes.           

Thus, a literary history which, from the start, keeps strict bonds to a root of island belonging, amplifies the spacialization into vectorization, guided to a “planetary” literature (SPIVAK, 2003, p. 72), untied from a root grounded in the concept of “nation” and headed by a rhizomatic structural conception.   

Born from the necessity of mapping the space, since the sixteenth and seventeenth-century traveling records, with diasporic and even transnational vocation, the Cape Verdean literature will overcome the anguish from isolation expressed in several works, especially the ones from the remarkable period of claridosa production, to dialog with the worldwide literature, overcoming the traumatic experience of the severe drought in the 1930 and 1940’s and of the consequential hunger in the sense of establishing a coexistence with the world and the contemporary experiences of uprooting and search for interlocution.

Ottmar Ette (2017, p. 54) understands “the Literature as a space in which one practices the Human coexistence”. Regarding the knowledge of coexistence, he asserts that the island and the archipelagoes will never be seen as figures anchored in a fixed place, but as dynamic entities (ETTE, 2012, p. 87). This way, supported by Ette, we conceived the meaningful structure of the island as a pair: on the one hand, it can mean a closed state, isolated from the Other; on the other hand, the awareness of a interrelatedness of multiple forms with the Other” (ETTE, 2005, p. 136).     

Considering the pandemic context in which we are painfully inserted currently, afraid of the physical contact, keeping social distancing, the Literature might be an open door so that we think over the islands which set us apart and the ones that enable the flight and the meeting, that is, the symbolic spaces of confinement, but also the spaces of contact which may represent the humanity in Cape Verde as well as in any other part of the world.

In this Issue 42 of the online academic journal Soletras, we invite researches to submit articles that think over the symbolic perspective of the island in: its structure of isolation or in relation to the other, bridge between identities or as belonging or rupture to the boundaries of space, which can only be enabled by the literary creation.   

Bibliography:

ETTE, Ottmar. Von Inseln, Grenzen und Vektoren. Versuch über die fraktale Inselwelt der Karibik. In: BRAIG, Marianne/.ETTE, Ottmar/ INGENSCHAY Dieter/ MAIHOLD, Günther; (ed.): Grenzen der Macht – Macht der Grenzen. Lateinamerika im globalen Kontext. Frankfurt M.: Vervuert Verlag, 2005, p. 135-180.

ETTE, Ottmar. Worldwide: Archipels de la mondialisation . Madrid, Frankfurt am Aim: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2012. Edição Kindle, online.

ETTE. Ottmar. Ciência da vida. Conferência em 3 partes. Rio de Janeiro: Casa de Leitura Dirce Côrtes Riedel, 4 de dezembro de 2017. Disponível em:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FV6dTKLV1U&index=3&list=PLZugpfRLjZ_qb9xNc8ApP35kT2vd-3Sn1>. Acesso em 18 de abril de 2020.

GOMES, Simone Caputo. Viagens da Literatura Cabo-verdiana entre raízes e rizomas, entre árvores e ondas: literatura mundo para uma pátria mundo. Conferência proferida no Festival Literatura-mundo do Sal, Cabo Verde, junho de 2018. Texto inédito, no prelo. In Via Atlântica n. 37,  Dossiê A Literatura-Mundial e o Sistema-Mundial Moderno.

OSÓRIO, Oswaldo. A sexagésima sétima curvatura. Praia: Dada Editora, 2007.

SPIVAK, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

Submissions: From November 1st, 2020 to April 30th, 2021.