Visiting dates: 11/2024 – 02/2025
“The Representation of the (Post-)Colonial Feminine Condition in Fiction from East Timor (20th and 21st Centuries)”, Damares Barbosa (University of São Paulo).
Based on the writings of East Timorese author Luís Cardoso, analyzed by literature and sociology, we address the theme of female protagonism in East Timor, represented by the figures in the novels “Owl Eyes, Wild Cat Eyes” and “Requiem for the Lonely Navigator,” based on historical events. This representation speaks to the non-subversion of women in the face of the social and political impositions that dictated the rules of East Timorese society in the 20th and 21st centuries.
We will thus primarily analyze female characters in historical and autobiographical times, in political and cultural, as well as patriarchal and postcolonial spaces, marked by gender, ethnicity, family, the body and its symbolism and materiality, religious and festive beliefs and rituals, and other characteristics that intersect in the fictional construction of these same possible worlds marked by fragmentation—a narrative strategy that conveys the identity and marks of colonial pasts and presents, both traumatic and violent.
The novels presented address, albeit metaphorically, the relationship between colonizer and colonized, and the female condition typifies the colonized above all in their accentuated degradation and exploitation.