DANAÇÃO DA NAÇÃO: LEGADOS COLONIAIS E PROJETOS NACIONAIS (PORTUGAL & BRASIL / INGLATERRA & IRLANDA)

Abstract

If the most striking imperial violence consists of epistemicide, and therefore its longest lasting sequel relies on cultural identity, the fabrication of this identity is a revealing material about the modes of management of the colonial legacy. Invested of successor legal status, the concept of legacy is conceptually operative because it indicates that decolonization, far from being carried out with Independence de jure, depends, in order to achieve Independence de facto, on the logistics of inherited material and symbolic goods. As the legacy has an indefeasible status and the legatee cannot ignore it at all, but can, rather, invest it in a sense other than the original, the concept provides a key reading to examine how colonial stereotypes are resemantized by the intelligentsia in its national project here understood as an apparent monolithic commitment in which symbolic battles are subjugated among affiliations of lettered men who claim for themselves the primacy of determining how and by whom the nation will be invented. On a comparative supranational horizon, this thesis proceeds to the comparison of Luso-Brazilian and Anglo-Irish relations in the scope of postcolonial criticism, in which they have been outlawed due to their idiosyncratic disjunctions, and investigates how the Brazilian and Irish national projects managed their respective legacies in their decolonization processes. Since the notion of inheritance implies anteriority, the research undertakes analysis of the colonial discourse to examine the recursion of feminization as a device for the invention of alterity from the knowledge/power binomial, embodied in writing practices such as literature. In order to investigate identity conflicts inherited from the colonial experience in the conjunctive invention of the notions of nationality and masculinity, this research also proceeds to the analysis of anticolonial discourse. Since the interval between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries was marked by the paroxysm of the national invention in both countries, the temporal cut corresponds to a level of cultural nationalism based on the obsession of Brazilian and Irish lettered men with their respective notions of formation and renaissance. In an episteme in which the nations value métron consisted of the virility gradient, the national projects, whose agonistic link with the colonial discourse subjected them to the circumscriptions of the same regime of signification to which they counterpunched, conceived the feminization bequeathed by colonialism as a damnation of the nation and thus they chose as leitmotiv the primacy of national revitalization in the sign chain in which the regenderation of masculinity was equivalent to the regeneration of nationality. Both of them, mutatis mutandis, resorted to more austere biopolitical devices than those in metropolitan modernity by adding legacy elements of colonizing metropolises to their interna corporis patriarchal structure. As a corollary, the Manichean economy based on the binarism of imperial virility versus colonial femininity was countered by similar economy, based on the radicalization of gender asymmetries, favored by the adoption of christianoid paradigms of manhood and womanhood. However, the homogenistic configuration of the projects was compromised by their constitutive contradictions, since their homosocial structure favored homoerotic sublimation and their heterocentric agenda was challenged, in the interstices of biopolitical apparatuses, by homoerotic subjects whose gender performativity played with instituted codes.