Passa-se com a alma algo semelhante ao que acontece à água: fl ui. Hoje está um rio. Amanhã estará mar. A água toma a forma do recipiente. Dentro de uma garrafa parece uma garrafa. Porém não é uma garrafa. (Agualusa, 2004: 198) LOCATING THE QUERY Aft er the demise of the Portuguese territorial empire, in 1975, with the collapse of the Portuguese dictatorship and the defeat in the independence wars in Africa, the Portuguese language assumed a core role in the constitution of the transnational Lusofonia "Lusophony". Th ere is an imperial metanarrative inscribed in the representations of the Portuguese language that shape this imagined community (Anderson, 1991), which includes Portugal and its former colonies in Latin America, Asia and Africa. Th e language stands here as synonym with a culture originated and centred in Portugal. African fi ction written in Portuguese has been abundantly problematising this centrality though the scrutiny of the relation between identity and alterity marked by Portuguese colonial history. Th is query is mainly carried out by Angolan, Mozambican and Cape Verdean writers, who have a highly developed consideration of those questions that shape border studies and theory (Fonseca, 2007). Eduardo Agualusa is one such writer. [1] His

It was our pleasure to interview Professors Ella Shohat and Robert Stam from New York University during their visit to the Netherlands to join two events hosted by the Postcolonial Initiative and the Centre for the Humanities of Utrecht University. In this interview they touch on points of critical importance to reflect on the themes developed throughout the current issue of P: Portuguese Cultural Studies.

Language discourse attached to Portuguese national culture has been critical for the re-establishment of the imperial centre in the space of encounter between Portugal and its former colonies. The Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa has been problematising this centrality; both criticising and re-enacting the mythology of a benevolent colonial encounter à la Portuguese. This article analyses the representations of the Portuguese language in Agualusa’s novel The Book of Chameleons. It unravels the author’s negotiations with the postcolonial narrative of imperial exceptionality, concluding about the transgressive quality of Agualusa’s language imagination.

This essay sets out to analyze the vectors of continuity and reconfiguration of the Portuguese empire in the narratives of the Portuguese language in its two hegemonic spaces, and within a new sphere, that of the Arts. It will explore the language narratives as they materialized in the Museu da Língua Portuguesa in São Paulo, and in the convoluted trajectory of its homologous museum’s projects in Lisbon. The main focus of this comparative analysis is how Africa—the one that belongs to the contemporary Portuguese and Brazilian imaginaries—has been represented in these museums. The object of analysis is therefore the imagination of Africa in Brazil and Portugal.

A língua portuguesa é um patrimônio contencioso. Este ensaio apresenta o resultado de um trabalho de investigação comparada entre o Museu da Língua Portuguesa, em São Paulo, e os projetos de museus homólogos em Lisboa. O foco da investigação é a representação da África na meta-narrativa da língua portuguesa, em uma nova e potencialmente inovadora esfera, a das Artes. O ensaio procurará identificar as instâncias de continuidade e reconfiguração do império na imaginação da África no âmbito destas iniciativas de musealiza-ção do patrimônio imaterial (trans)nacional.

Coloco aqui breves observações sobre a presença e o lugar designado a sujeitos diaspóricos africanos, neste amálgama desigual denominado Estudos Luso-Afro-Brasileiros, onde o status do Afro é invariavelmente precário. São observações feitas a partir da Europa, entre a academia e outros lugares de (outros) saberes. Inicio apontando para a necessidade fundamental da análise crítica da construção da autoridade acadêmica centrada no sujeito normativo-aquele que Sylvia Wynter denomina Man (a versão hegemônica branca ocidental do humano).

This article will point to distinctive features of racism in the Netherlands, which will support the analysis of the 2013 events. 2013 deserves attention for it marks the moment when the discussion of Zwarte Piet broke into the mainstream public sphere, turning effectively into the most important and mediatized topic of debate, which involved the Dutch political (and legal) authorities. This analysis will reveal the mechanisms through which the political and media establishment racially framed the controversy around Zwarte Piet. My aim is to identify the continuous operation of the racial grammar inherited from the empire, through which the white Dutch established order contains Black people and voices.
The article delineates the workings of racism within the very racism debate. Its focus is in the Netherlands, but it is grounded in the broader context of contemporary neo-liberal racisms in Europe harboured in denial, titled by David Goldberg as European postraciality. This concept articulates with Fatima El-Tayeb’s characterization of European racelessness, as a forceful disavowal of racism in a continent haunted by the ghost of race. This article will trace this haunting, in word and space.
This article will be out in the special issue of the journal Darkmatter about blackface and anti-Black racism in the fall of 2020.

Dit essay gaat over de fundamentele kwestie van de productie
van kennis over het trans-Atlantische slavernijverleden en over
de doorwerking daarvan in het hedendaags racisme. Ik zal me
concentreren op het hoger onderwijs en meer specifiek op de
universiteit. Ik zal eerst het cruciale belang schetsen van de
trans-Atlantische slavernij voor de Nederlandse moderniteit.
Ik zal aangeven hoe anti-zwart racisme een organiserend
principe is in Nederland. Daarna zal ik ingaan op de recente
aandacht voor het Nederlandse trans-Atlantische slavernijverleden
en racisme in de publieke sfeer en op de universiteit.
Ik zal daarbij echter aangeven hoe de universiteit het kennisregime
reproduceert dat in het slavernijverleden is medebepaald.
Ik zal eindigen met het noemen van mogelijke
uitwegen.

Abstract:

Perceptions of the human voice and of gender are interconnected. This is the central premise of this thesis, which explores the complex interplay between vocal timbre, pitch, and various constructions of gender, using as a focal context the operatic castrato and the onnagata, a male actor specialising in female roles in Japanese kabuki theatre. Viewed as paradigmatic examples of gender ambiguity on- and off-stage, the two phenomena and genres originated independently of each other in early 17th-century Italy and Japan. They are examined comparatively here for the first time.

Chapter one defines the theoretical framework necessary to establish the interconnection between voice and gender. John Langshaw Austin’s concept of the performative and his speech act theory are used to show that the meaning of every single human utterance as perceived by the listener is influenced by a variety of factors, one of them being the voice as a signifier of gender. Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity is used to demonstrate that voice not only indicates gender but also plays a crucial role in its construction. The conclusion is that voice single-handedly has sufficient potential to transgress culturally established gender boundaries, as a result decisively being able to mark (or blur) established gender categories.

The following two chapters discuss the social, cultural, and political conditions that led to the emergence, rise, and decline of the operatic castrato and Edo-period onnagata. The “unnatural” body and voice of the castrato and the highly stylized bodily and vocal transformation of the onnagata from male to the embodiment of femininity were the primary sources of their gendered otherness. Both performing traditions evolved in two patriarchal societies whose conceptions of sex, gender, sexuality, and the human body markedly differed from our modern ones, providing a cultural climate and an ideological framework enabling them not only to “survive” but also to be admired as artists and oftentimes desired as sexual partners, by men and women alike. The differences between pre-modern and current conceptions of sex and gender are clearly reflected in the fact that soon after the modern, binary model of gender construction achieved dominance in 19th-century Europe and post-Tokugawa Japan, castrati became extinct while onnagata stopped with the practise of living as onnagata in everyday life.
Chapter four elucidates those aspects of the physiology and functioning of the human voice that are crucial to understanding the differences between a “normally” developed and/or trained voice and that of a castrato and an onnagata. Castration performed before the onset of puberty prevented the vocal folds from growing, thereby preserving the high-pitched voice of a prepubescent boy. Coupled with its other physical effects as well as prolonged and intensive vocal training, the castrato developed a voice of unique sound qualities, easily distinguishable from others regardless whether used in speech or song. An onnagata achieved a similar effect by using his hormonally unaltered male voice in a very special way. Unique vocal patterns and techniques, including constant shifting between falsetto and chest registers, serve to produce a variety of sounds signifying his otherness from both average contemporary males and females equally clearly in the theatre and outside it.

By arguing that male and female genders are two sets of culturally specific expectations imposed upon the human body that encompass a wide range of possibilities, in particular within the specific contexts of body manipulations, and by emphasising the role of voice in this context, this study suggests that the human voice alone has the power of significantly shaping the boundaries of culturally predominant gender categories. In doing so, the thesis establishes that the human voice and gender are inseparably connected and mutually condition one another, a point hitherto barely made in both gender studies and musicology. Moreover, by considering the ways the operatic castrato and the onnagata were conceptualised and perceived before and after the widespread acceptance of the current, binary model of gender construction in Europe and Japan, it demonstrates the cultural power of the concept of gender as well as its historically unstable nature.