THERE IS A LAND INSIDE ME FROM WHICH I AM BANISHED: LITERATURE AND NECROPOLITICS IN CADERNO DE MEMÓRIAS COLONIAIS

Abstract

The fiction produced by colonialism has a decisive function in the face of facts, indissociated from the fables of colonialism. After all, on the one hand, fiction participates in colonial discourses that, as Achille Mbembe (2014b, p. 69) observes, cover up the necropolitics that, "when transiting through fiction, falls ill with life, or even in an act of permanent reversal, takes death for life and life for death". On the other hand, fiction problematizes these discourses, so that literature assumes divergent functions. Thus, this article aims to analyze relationships between literature and necropolitics in Caderno de memórias coloniais, by Isabela Figueiredo. For that, it is based on postcolonial critique which, according to Mbembe (2014b, p. 68), "tries to deconstruct colonial prose, that is, the mental montage, representations and symbolic forms that serve as infrastructure to the imperial project". Based mainly on Roberto Vecchi’s and Achille Mbembe’s work, the article understands Isabela Figueiredo’s novel as a testimony of the interdict or repressed by the colonialist discourses of Portugal.