Jean-Marc Moura

“Atlantic history” has been a significant paradigm in the Anglophone historiography for more than twenty years. Undoubtedly, it has been the source of a number of important books considering the Atlantic area and its cultural system interconnecting three continents, Europe, Africa and America. We would like to focus critical attention on contemporary international and transcultural literary creations written in a European language (Dutch, English, French, Portuguese and Spanish). Our project aims of mapping and analyzing the multiple circulations, exchanges and literary migrations between the three continents, from 1945 to 2000. The analysis will not be developed on a regional or on a linguistic level (i.e. “Commonwealth Studies”, “francophonie”, “hispano-hablantes” or “lusophone” countries). Rather, it will examine the complex set of relations that characterize the cultural and literary creations of the Atlantic world.

The Atlantic has been the source or a number of paradigms developed in various areas. Examples of these include: ‘Créolité’, ‘créolisation’, ‘la relation’, ‘the Commonwealth’, ‘world literature’, ‘the Black Atlantic’ and ‘littérature-monde’. However, we propose to rethink and examine these debates beyond the regional, disciplinary, linguistic and national engagements, in order to generate theoretical frameworks that account for the hybrid literary dialogue between Africa, America and Europe. Thus, the transcultural and multilingual dimensions of dynamics such as “Négritude”, “magical realism” or “Créolité” will be interpreted in an appropriate context. The works and the reception of such writers as Aimé Césaire, L. S. Senghor, V.S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier, Pepetela or Antonio Lobo Antunes should be considered through a comparative critical framework which takes into account the whole Atlantic system of cultural and literary exchanges. 

We propose to examine the imagined definitions of the literary Atlantic region. What types of mental geographies do artists and writers of this region create and enact in their work? How do these engage with and/or re-shape current geographical configurations of the “West”, the “metropolitan space” and “the colonies”, “home” and “adopted country” in the XXth century? What role do language and culture play in the processes of Atlantic circulations? The project of a literary history of the post-colonial Atlantic area seems particularly relevant to European humanities, since it concerns the study of the recent, and crucial, contacts and exchanges between Europe and the other continents and/or civilizations.