Description
- Abstract:
- In this dissertation, I propose a comparative study of short fiction written in Portuguese by African women authors from five countries: Cape Verde, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Mozambique. I focus on works by Fátima Bettencourt, Orlanda Amarílis, Ana Paula Tavares, Isabel Ferreira, Odete Costa Semedo, Domingas Samy, Alda Espírito Santo, Maria Olinda Beja, Paulina Chiziane, and Lília Momplé. My aim is to illuminate female perspectives that remain underexplored and less visible than those of male authors in African literatures in Portuguese. Drawing on feminist and decolonial literary and translation theories, I argue that these writers employ shared narrative strategies while maintaining distinct voices that together form a continuum of African women’s writing. The dissertation begins by situating African women’s short fiction within the African literary traditions in Portuguese, emphasizing the importance of orality, folklore, and storytelling as fundamental elements. I reflect on Eurocentric literary definitions of the short story in contrast to African contexts and outline a literary chronology of women’s writing in the five countries studied. I then examine the biographies, educational trajectories, linguistic choices, and literary networks of the selected authors, exploring the relationship between individual life stories and collective struggles shaped by colonial and postcolonial histories. Through close readings of selected short stories, I analyze linguistic, stylistic, and thematic strategies, including disruptions of normative grammar and punctuation, the integration of Creole and local languages, and genre hybridity. I examine representations of women’s agency, subordination, and resistance across political, cultural, social, and religious dimensions, as well as themes of embodiment, sisterhood, and gender hierarchies imposed by colonialism and local traditions. I also explore narratives of migration, diaspora, and dislocation, where location emerges as fluid and transitional rather than fixed. In the final chapter, I examine African women’s writing as an inherent act of translation and analyze existing translations, as well as my own renditions, of selected stories into English. I argue that these texts reshape Portuguese into a vehicle for distinct cultural world-senses and that translation can function as a politically engaged decolonial practice, contributing to the deconstruction of colonial systems of meaning.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2026
Citation
Silva Fernandes, Joyce,
"African Women's Short Fiction in Portuguese"
(2026).
Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:fsqu9p38/
Relations
Collection:
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Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Portuguese and Brazilian Studies department....