Serena Rivera

Food in a Context of Disjuncture While Cabo Verdean author Baltasar Lopes da Silva (1907–1989) in his coming-of-age novel, Chiquinho (1947), and Mozambique's first female novelist Paulina Chiziane (1955–) in her novel Niketche: uma história de poligamia (2002), write from different historical and cultural perspectives, a comparison between these two works opens a critical space for probing the authors' respective conceptions of social normativity. In a sense, their divergent style and subjective content allow us to juxtapose their works and, in doing so, delineate the ways in which the two authors differently construed their social worlds and critically assessed their respective realities, while also uncovering their distinctive subjectivities. We suggest that a comparison between these two works has the potential to unravel commonalities in the authors' conception of an ideal social order where kinship and sustenance remain the principal glue and guarantor of social cohesion and well-being. Theoretically, these commonalities, we argue, are best extricated through the conceptual scope of David Sutton in his extension of James Fernandez' theorizing in Persuasions and Performances. Fernandez argues that the 'whole', a space imbued with a sense of conviviality with a community, is reached through the selection of metaphors that decrease the inchoateness between phenomenological human perception and the communicative act. Sutton furthers this idea through his argumentation that food, specifically in the sensorial nature of its consumption, is one of the most potent mechanisms in the process of returning to the 'whole'. We argue in particular that, in a colonial situation of cultural and linguistic oppression and in a post-independence situation of rapid change, the use of food tropes allows the authors to unmask colonial and postcolonial modalities of domination and assist the main characters in reaching a space of wholeness and self-liberation.

Com a expansão e a consolidação da área de Português para Falantes de Outras Línguas, observa-se uma crescente demanda pela aprendizagem do português por estrangeiros e, consequentemente, pelo ensino dessa língua em contextos variados. Do interesse de explorar este crescimento, surgiu a ideia de compilar trabalhos já desenvolvidos com foco na história, no desenvolvimento e nas perspectivas para o ensino de português em universidades nos Estados Unidos. Ao fazer um levantamento de trabalhos já publicados sobre esse assunto, este estudo pretende contribuir para o mapeamento do ensino e da expansão do português em universidades estadunidenses e reunir informações importantes que, muitas vezes, isoladas, podem levar mais tempo para refletir no ensino e na pesquisa.

Abstract. The analysis of food tropes in Lusophone African literature and what the eating politics embedded in such tropes reveal about Lusophone African societies is a critical topic still in its preliminary stages. Adding to the contributions of critics such as Njeri Githire and Isabel Rodrigues, this paper focuses comparatively on the ways in which food and eating politics, as represented in two Mozambican novels, Lília Momplé's Neighbours (1995) and Paulina Chiziane's Niketche: uma história de poligamia (2002), unveil a troubled dialectics of decadence and modernization and tradition and modernity in post-independence southern Mozambique. While critical analyses of the novels have thus far separately highlighted how the authors, through narrative and allegory, uncover the failure of FRELIMO's post-independence socialist governance to establish the equality and stability promised, specifically with regard to parity among the genders, the connection between food and gender politics in these narratives has yet to be truly explored. Employing Signe Arnfred's Sexuality and Gender Politics in Mozambique and Hilary Owen's Mother Africa/Father Marx, as well as critical food theories, this paper offers a comparative approach to the ways in which the two authors articulate the ambivalences of modernization in post-independence southern Mozambique through food tropes.

The presence of food in Aluísio Azevedo's most widely read novel, O Cortiço (1890), plays an undeniably crucial role in narrating the multifaceted politics of urbanization, immigration, and race relations in Rio de Janeiro at the end of the nineteenth century. While critics have seen food in the novel as a metonym of the energy force of the slum (Bueno), a potent trope for analyzing urban life at the turn of the century (Queiroz), and as playing a role in the relationship between race and nationalism in Brazil (Bletz), it has yet to be analyzed from a perspective focused on gender relations and models of masculinity during this particularly intense period of social change in Brazil. This paper aims to explore the functional role of food in the trajectory of main characters, Portuguese immigrants João Romão, Miranda and Jerônimo, towards the fulfillment of hegemonic notions of masculinity and evolving forms of Brazilian belonging and nationhood. Employing Richard Miskolci's theorization of Brazilian masculinities in O Desejo da Nação: Masculinidade e branquitude no Brasil de fins do XIX, Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject, as well as James Fernandez's politics of the metaphor, I argue that Azevedo's use of food tropes in O Cortiço powerfully narrates the (de)stabilization of hegemonic and emerging notions of masculinity in late nineteenth-century Brazil.

As is widely acknowledged, the period that followed the independence of both Mozambique and Angola from Portuguese colonial rule was characterized by infrastructural deficiencies and widespread instability across various facets of life in these emerging nations. During those times, notable authors, such as Lília Momplé and Manuel Rui, attempted to encapsulate through their work the frustrations of the countries’ population in relation to the clear socioeconomic inequality, as well as its consequences. Momplé’s Neighbours (1995) and Rui’s Quem me dera ser onda (1984), while calling attention to these multiple deficiencies, are particularly centered on their characters’ relationship to food, gendered food practices, and the connection between food and gender inequality and state-level politics. Through a comparative reading of these novellas, this paper will analyze how the instability that characterized the transition into independence within Mozambique and Angola affected ideologies of feminine domesticity, specifically in regard to the roles of women as sustenance providers to the nations’ men and as caretakers of children and households. Incorporating theoretical works that address the gendered politics of food across various literary and cultural contexts and situating the socio-historical background of Mozambique and Angola, I argue that the critical reading of the semiotics of food—variety and lack thereof, preparation, consumption, availabilities, and so on—within these novellas, serves to accentuate the space of inbetweenness women occupy both in the kitchen and social sphere. More precisely, inbetweenness, as it occurs throughout the novellas linked to femininities and food, emerges as a salient theme highlighted by the socio-cultural obstacles faced by women as they struggle with the transition from colonial gender ideologies of domestic servitude to the formation and fashioning of ideals of post-independence femininity.

This paper endeavors to explore the role of food in the ambivalent and ambiguous modernization processes of late nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro and early twentieth-century São Paulo, as expressed through Aluísio Azevedo's O Cortiço and Patrícia Galvão's Parque Industrial. Rather than focusing specifically on the racial and gendered evolutions born from burgeoning capitalist economies, urbanization and industrialization, this paper will examine the ways in which the abject politics of food within these two novels serve as a metonymic reminder of the racial ambivalences of Brazil's processes of modernization. The shift in culinary desires in O Cortiço and the resulting hunger seen decades later in Parque Industrial appear cleverly intertwined in the racial politics of elite-enforced processes of modernization in Brazil. Employing Thomas Skidmore's study on the evolution of racial politics in Brazil in Black into White and aligning with Julia Kristeva's theory in Powers of Horror regarding the abject, I argue that images revolving around food and lack thereof in these two novels inevitably serve to accentuate the ambivalences regarding race that characterize the attempts of Brazil's elite to construct a modern future.

Paulina Chiziane's 2002 novel, Niketche: uma história de poligamia, narrates the tale of Rami and her obstacle-ridden relationship with her husband, Tony, whom she discovers to be practicing polygamy with four other wives. Although polygamy has been outlawed in Mozambique, in the country’s patriarchal southern region, where the novel takes place, it remains an expression of virility and alpha male status for men, as well as a justification for their philandering ways. While the plot focuses on the complications that arise in the polygamous relationship between Rami, her husband, and his other wives, this paper argues that their "hexágono amoroso" (60) is further complicated by a simultaneous cultural discourse on food practices. Additionally, while many critics of Chiziane's work focus on the ways in which the novel’s discourse on polygamy serves as a metonymy of the dismissal of women and femininities from participating in the larger national ideal, this paper intends to focus its analytical framework on the role of masculinities in present Mozambican society, as portrayed in Niketche, and on how their expression is constructed and maintained by oral histories that demarcate gender-specific practices of food production, distribution and consumption. In this regard, I explore the ways in which the novel’s discourse on food disseminates specific knowledge on the maintenance of hegemonic masculinities. While focusing more generally on alimentary discourses that serve as metonymic reminders of categorical boundaries between the genders, this paper will discuss in particular—with recourse to Achille Mbembe's theorizing of fetishization and enchantment of (post)colonial subjects in On the Postcolony and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection in Powers of Horror—the fetishization of the moela as a symbolically saturated food item, delineating this delicacy's role in the maintenance of dominant paradigms of masculinity in post-independence Mozambique. Exploring the traditional cultural bias that limits women to the consumption of less desirable parts of a chicken while reserving the more coveted pieces for men (most importantly, the moela) will ultimately drive the argument that the role of food preparation in the maintenance of ideal femininity is analogous to the role of gender-specific food consumption in upholding socially sanctioned forms of masculinity.