Lusophonia vs. Lusutopia, MLA vs.

MTA
Author(s): Thomas O. Beebee
Source: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 50, No. 2 (2013), pp. 211-218
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/complitstudies.50.2.0211
Accessed: 29-07-2016 00:48 UTC

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/complitstudies.50.2.0211?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Comparative Literature Studies

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Fri, 29 Jul 2016 00:48:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 lusophonia vs. lusutopia, mla vs. mta

Thomas O. Beebee
I do not mean to suggest that we cease to be Luso-Brazilianists
and become comparatists.
—Francis Rogers

This epigraph, which comes from a 1953 article by one of the key figures in the
rise of lusophone studies in the United States, should strike us as paradoxical:
the discipline named already displays a hyphenated identity—encompassing
both Lusitania (Portugal) and Brazil—that would seem to make compara-
tive approaches inevitable.1 I should explain that Rogers is referring not to
comparison within his discipline, but to the analogy between Portuguese and
other “single” languages that have spread to four (or more) continents and
become the official and literary languages of vastly different cultures. (In the
case of Portuguese, the four continents are Europe, South America, Africa,
and Asia, [Portuguese is a co-official language of East Timor and Macau].)
Rogers is saying that the comparison of seemingly analogous situations of
world languages in postcolonial contexts is intellectually suspect, and in any
case more than any one scholar can handle. But I wish to read the quote on
its surface, as it were, as pointing out the tension between Lusophonia and
Lusutopia. Unlike English, French, and Spanish, the Portuguese language
finds no place in the MLA divisional structure but it is rather called forth
only in the dash that connects Lusitania with Brazil.
The lusophonic approach reads the dash between “Luso” and “Brazilian”
as a connector between two vastly different cultures that are related through
the fact that they share a language. There are, of course, very pragmatic
reasons for this connection: knowing the language is a necessary gateway
to both cultures. But the dash can also be read disjunctively, as highlight-
ing the doubleness of the name and the fact that the phonic connection is

comparative literature studies, vol. 50, no. 2, 2013.

Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

211

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Fri, 29 Jul 2016 00:48:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

CLS 50.2_04_Beebee.indd 211 30/04/13 3:24 PM

 212 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

(Lus)utopian, creating a nonplace where comparison operates. Interestingly,

translating “dash” into Portuguese yields “traço” or “tracinho”—the trace. The
trace suggests absence and presence at the same time. It reminds us as well
of those literatures that are missing from the formulation “Luso-Brazilian,”
which are usually referred to as “lusophone African.”
The idea of global comparison voiced in the title of this collection of
articles invokes the dialectical relation between comparative and world lit-
erature, the utopian construction of a topos (the world) through an approach
to literature that is nongeographical and supralinguistic. How does such a
project fare when it kicks against the pricks of divisional slicing and dicing,
such as those practiced by the premier organization in our field, the MLA?
Elsewhere in this cluster, Françoise Lionnet provisionally answers this ques-
tion: “The MLA should reexamine its binary separation of English from
so-called foreign languages. The vibrant contemporary presence of many
languages right here in the United States makes the MLA’s basic structure
increasingly irrelevant. Linguistic diversity has always existed on the ground
in the United States. . . . But its role has been invisible to literary scholars
who specialize in monolingual traditions reinforced by the MLA’s separate
domains” (221). Lionnet’s statement defines the trace nature of polylingual
reality on the ground. Were our episteme to be dominated by topographies
of language, then we would need to organize so as to overcome these separate
language domains. At its highest levels, however, the MLA is organized
phonically, according to languages, then chronologically, and only then
topically, that is, either by the topography of place or by topic.
So, the “MTA” of my title does not signify the New York public trans-
portation system that faithfully brings the valiant workers of the Manhattan
MLA headquarters in to their work and then carries them back to home and
family at the end of the day. The MTA in my title alludes to a heterotopical
version of the MLA, the Modern Temporal/Topical Association, wherein
“topos” is taken both in its basic meaning of “place” and in its metaphori-
cal one of “topic.” My point is that while the “L” in MLA can sign both
­“ language” and “literature,” the way the organizational structure of the MLA
addresses its work has as much to do with temporae and topoi as it does with
l-words. To repeat what is commonly known, the MLA was founded in 1883
(it is older than the MTA) to support and give voice to the study of modern,
“live” languages as opposed to classical ones. It took from the more established
and prestigious discipline of classics a philological approach to literature,
which largely treated texts as depositories of linguistic data and emphasized
commentary and translation over interpretation. Thus, the earliest division
of the MLA was into a “phonetic section” and a ­“pedagogical section.”

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Fri, 29 Jul 2016 00:48:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

CLS 50.2_04_Beebee.indd 212 30/04/13 3:24 PM

 LUSOPHONIA VS. LUSu TOPIA 213

From the founding of the PMLA, philological and linguistics articles not
only appeared alongside ones devoted to literary and cultural analysis but
frequently outnumbered them. Tellingly, at the 1890 convention at Vanderbilt
University, Professor John Phelps Fruit delivered a paper titled “A Plea for
the Study of Literature from the Aesthetic Standpoint.”2
As the MLA grew, its sections continued bifurcating until they became
divisions. According to its website and judging by the way the program for
its annual convention takes place, the MLA insists absolutely on the primacy
of its divisional structure as the grounding episteme for scholarly work. The
language is totalizing: “MLA divisions encompass the primary scholarly and
professional concerns of the association” (emphasis mine).3 It is interesting
to compare this epistemology with that of the other two organizations that
support comparative and world literature: the International Comparative
Literature Association and the American Comparative Literature Associa-
tion. The latter organization has no divisions of any kind, while the former
has research committees on a heterogeneous list of topics, from literary
theory to literature and neuroscience.4
When we examine the way the division structure as a whole accom-
plishes its encompassing of MLA scholarly and professional concerns, we
find that little has changed since Reed Way Dasenbrock’s analysis of “English
department geography” in a 1987 issue of the ADE Bulletin.5 Notice, first of
all, the “T” (topographical) idea as an organizational principle. Dasenbrock
found that professional activity occurred within the limitations of four
nested hierarchical structures, beginning with what he calls “us” and “them,”
which is the most fundamental. In MLA terms, these are of course the
English and the foreign language arms of the association, the Association
of Departments of English and the Association of Departments of Foreign
Languages, topically situated in the two main hotels of the convention.
Next come the specific language areas, such as those of Lusophonia. Then
comes the topographic situatedness of nationality. Here Dasenbrock shows
his English affiliations when he notes the strong division between American
and British in specialization, anthologization, and other regimes of knowl-
edge production. Readers will be familiar with a similar divide within the
Spanish language between Peninsular and American specializations, and
this divide generally obtains in the study of the Portuguese language as well.
Then there is frequently a final, smaller divider, usually a period of time,
as one can see in the division structure that prominently features centuries.
Only two divisions of the MLA are devoted to single authors: Chaucer and
Shakespeare, leading to the former author being exiled from the language he
wrote in—“Middle English Language and Literature, Excluding C ­ haucer.”

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Fri, 29 Jul 2016 00:48:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

CLS 50.2_04_Beebee.indd 213 30/04/13 3:24 PM

 214 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

Read without the comma, as a newspaper headline, this division title acquires
a radical poignancy.
Despite its nested hierarchies, the divisional structure of the MLA
seems on its surface to be more favorable to comparative studies than, for
example, funding entities at most universities. (consult the complete listing
at the site referenced in endnote 3). There are no less than six divisions under
the heading “Comparative Studies,” covering the predictable temporalities
of literature from medieval to the twentieth century and also including
European literary relations. This rivals the number of American divisions,
which is eight. Genre studies, another rubric, seems to encourage and would
certainly allow for comparative studies as well—of drama, of the novel, or of
literary criticism, for example. Then there are the interdisciplinary divisions
that delimit neither with an “L” (language) nor a “T” (topography), adding
to the enforced or mandated comparison of the comparative studies divisions
the implicit or allowed comparison of these rubrics.
Yet in the end, such apparent promotions of comparativism are really
fata morgana leading comparatists into the divisional desert to die of thirst.
Comparative literature exists in those aporetic interstices that neither
belong to nor can exist independently from structure, as Jacques Derrida has
exemplified with the statement that the center of a structure is, “paradoxi-
cally, within the structure and outside it” (emphasis his).6 To put it another
way, comparative literature has no object of study, the way most academic
disciplines can be said to have one, or perhaps more accurately, can be said
to construct one. Economics studies economy, sociology studies society,
anthropology studies anthropoi, English studies English, Spanish studies
Spanish, and of course Luso-Brazilian—as is evident from its name—studies
Portuguese. But there is no comparative literature to be studied, it is only
the studying. Comparative literature is the Humean third term not directly
observed betwixt two (or more) objects.7 The statement “I study compara-
tive literature” is a qualitatively different utterance from “I study English
literature.” The latter delimits a corpus of texts, while the former gestures
towards a methodology.
Compared to the alternative isolationism of the major languages that
are divided by period, the minor-language status of Lusophonia that allows it
only a single division that dare not state its name seems to provide an advan-
tage. The struggle for visibility from underneath the shadow of the major
languages could be conducive to a kind of transnational solidarity. An example
of how the division on Luso-Brazilian language and literature benefits from
its singleton status is a session at the 2011 MLA: entitled “Luso-Brazilian
Literatures and the Critical Global Humanities,” it cashed in doubly on the

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Fri, 29 Jul 2016 00:48:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

CLS 50.2_04_Beebee.indd 214 30/04/13 3:24 PM

 LUSOPHONIA VS. LUSu TOPIA 215

comparative opportunities provided, with presentations on the Angolan

Manuel dos Santos Lima, the Brazilian João Guimarães Rosa in his global
reception, and a comparison between Rubem Fonseca and the Chilean writer
Roberto Bolaño. Even more promising, then, are the other singleton and
doubletons, such as East Asian literatures and African literatures. Rather
than being isolated in luxury suites or skyboxes at a football game, as happens
with the American and English literature divisions, scholars in these divisions
enjoy a forced camaraderie, like travelers in a train compartment on a long
journey, perhaps a three-day one from Paris to Lisbon. Such situations can
produce a remarkable amount of cultural interchange; they can also result
in fistfights and mutual incomprehension. Incomprehension may especially
appear when resources are scarce, and other hungry travelers are eyeing your
extravagant mortadella sandwich. In the academy, scarcity is measured mostly
in FTEs; in the MLA it is mostly gauged in guaranteed paper sessions, and
the belief seems to reign that the more papers in your language area that
are delivered at the MLA and the better positioned that area is in terms of
knowledge production, the larger its footprint on the global map as drawn
by the MLA becomes. Admittedly, the attraction of the cozy, big tent of a
single division under which all of Lusutopia can fit depends in part on the
seeming coordination with other events that may or may not be part of the
MLA structure: the number of interviews for Portuguese-language positions,
for example, or the number of field-specific offerings at the book exhibit. In
any case, however, rather than dividing the field further, I would prefer to see
an even larger tent, a topos we can all relate to, or a new divisional episteme
corresponding more closely to postcolonial realities I now briefly discuss.
As with English, the idea of Lusophonia encompasses both those nations
that have evolved independent literatures and relatively strong domestic
readerships for those literatures over the course of centuries—­Brazil and
Portugal—and at the same time also those emergent nations such as Angola,
Cape Verde, and Mozambique, whose authors must frequently be pub-
lished in Portugal or Brazil rather than in their native countries and whose
works are heavily marked by an appeal to readers outside national and even
regional boundaries. The lack of readership within these nations stems from
the distance of the Portuguese language from the majority of their popula-
tions, or, to put it inversely, from the polylingual reality on the ground of
Angola, Guinea-Bissau, or São Tomé. The name of the single MLA division
responsible for all activities, Luso-Brazilian, mirrors that of the most vener-
able scholarly quarterly in the field, which was founded in 1964, before the
wars of independence laid the groundwork for the entry of the literatures of
lusophone Africa onto the world stage. The first article to quote an African

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Fri, 29 Jul 2016 00:48:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

CLS 50.2_04_Beebee.indd 215 30/04/13 3:24 PM

 216 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

author in Luso-Brazilian Review was Don Burness’s f­our-page treatment

of Nzinga Mbandi and Angolan Independence in 1977.8 (The authors were
Agostinho Neto and Manuel Pacavira.) The dash deceives with its implied
comparative “and,” when it really means “or”: choose one of the two then-
independent nations with Portuguese as an official language. At present,
however, the name seems to indicate something more akin to “Lusutopia
plus Brazil,” meaning “Brazil and the rest of the lusophone countries.”
In contrast, in a survey article on Portuguese-language literature as
world literature, Earl Fitz takes care either to pair or differentiate “Luso-
Brazilian” and “Luso-African.”9 Writers such as José Eduardo Agualusa
(1960–) of Angola and Mia Couto (1955–) of Mozambique function as
translators and literary intermediaries on two levels, first, between the largely
oral cultures existing in local languages in their nations and their official
and literary language of Portuguese, and second, between local, African
conditions and a world readership. Couto has said the following about the
language situation in Mozambique: “Portuguese is not yet the language of
Mozambique, but it is without doubt the language of Mozambiqueness” (“A
lingua portuguesa não é, ainda, a lingua de Moçambique, mas é seguramente
a lingua da moçambicanidade”).10 Couto notes that only about 5 percent of
Mozambicans have Portuguese as a mother tongue, placing the others in
a situation whereby they are only exposed to this discourse of nation, this
Mozambiqueness, in translation. He has also composed at least one novel
on the theme of translation. The unnamed, first-person narrator-protagonist
begins by recounting his experiences as a translator and defending himself
against the charge of distorting reality: ‘It was I who wrote down, in visible
Portuguese, the discourses that follow. . . . While events were happening, I
was translator in the service of the administration of the city of Tizangara. . . .
I was accused of lying, of falsifying proofs of the [soldiers’] murder. I was
condemned” (translation mine) (“Fui eu que transcrevi, em português
visível, as falas que daqui se seguem. . . . Na altura dos acontecimentos, eu
era tradutor ao serviço da administração de Tizangara. . . . Fui acusado de
mentir, falsear as provas de assassinato. Me condenaram”).11 The narrator
is a prosthetic self of the author who condemns himself for his inability to
convey the multilingual situation on the ground except through translation.
José Eduardo Agualusa, who was born in Angola but who has spent
a considerable amount of time in both in Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro, has
expressed this situation thus: “African writers are in a curious position: Our
readers are not in our own countries but in Europe. We write for foreign-
ers, and it changes the way we write. We, as African authors, are more like
translators—always trying to translate our reality for the foreign reader. I see

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Fri, 29 Jul 2016 00:48:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

CLS 50.2_04_Beebee.indd 216 30/04/13 3:24 PM

 LUSOPHONIA VS. LUSu TOPIA 217

it as a challenge more than an obstacle, however—a challenge that forces

us to find literary solutions for our fiction.”12 In this sense, it is interesting
to note the name of the official structure of so-called lusophone countries:
it is not what I have just said in introducing it but rather “countries with
Portuguese as an official language,” thus emphasizing that Lusutopia does
not entirely coincide with Lusophonia, and in fact that it exceeds the con-
ceptual space accorded to the lusophone. Conversely, a dominant theme of
the prose fiction of Portugal after the end of its empire in the late 1970s has
been the memory of Africa and its deferred deployment in the Portuguese
psyche. Witness how this plays out in the fiction of António Lobo Antunes,
for example, from Fado Alexandrino to Esplendor de Portugal and beyond.13
These novels use stream-of-consciousness technique to construct a u-topian
space of narrative in which the reader experiences repeated shocks of temporal
and geographical dislocation, as the trauma of Portuguese colonization and
colonial warfare replay itself in the psyches and discourse of Lobo Antunes’s
protagonists. Like veteran roller-coaster riders, readers of Lobo Antunes
learn to expect the experience of sudden dislocations between continents in
the flow of the protagonists’ acts of memory and retelling, in their attempts
to recover the trace of their lost experiences in lusophone colonialism.
Obviously, the MLA by itself cannot be expected to solve the issues
addressed by lusophone African authors. It cannot by itself promote the
study of the local languages spoken on the ground of Lusutopia or the study
of their relation to the official language of Portuguese. The recent provision
allowing for joint sessions might encourage collaboration between the Luso-
Brazilian and the one and only division on African literatures. But the MLA
should also recognize that there are scholarly and academic concerns related
to modern languages that its present divisional structure fails to encompass.
And Luso-Brazilianists should indeed be comparatists.

Notes
1. Francis Rogers, Atas do colóquio internacional de estudos luso-brasileiros (Nashville:
­Vanderbilt University Press, 1953), 28.
2. PMLA 5 (1890): lv.
3. “Policies for Divisions, Discussion Groups, and Allied Organizations,” Modern Language
Association, http://www.mla.org/policies_for_divisio.
4. “Organization Page,” International Comparative Literature Association, http://www.
ailc-icla.org/site/?page_id=8.
5. Reed Way Dasenbrock, “English Department Geography,” ADE Bulletin 86 (Spring
1987): 18–23.
6. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Humanities” in Writing
and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 279.

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Fri, 29 Jul 2016 00:48:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

CLS 50.2_04_Beebee.indd 217 30/04/13 3:24 PM

 218 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

7. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 110: “Suppose two objects to be presented to us, of
which the one is the cause and the other the effect; it is plain, that from the simple consideration
of one, or both these objects we never shall perceive the tie by which they are united, or be
able certainly to pronounce, that there is a connexion betwixt them.” “Cause and effect” imply
influence study or a certain type of literary history, but no practicing comparatist should feel
compelled to compare in an obvious or overt way—neither in the positivist modality of how
author Ichi influenced author Ni, nor in the theme-and-variation approach of how Fulano’s
work treats the image of the handkerchief differently from Mingano’s.
8. Donald Burness, “‘Nzinga Mbandi’ and Angolan Independence,” Luso-Brazilian Review
14.2 (1977): 225–29.
9. Earl Fitz, “Internationalizing the Literature of the Portuguese-Speaking World,” Hispania
85.3 (2002): 440, 447.
10. Mia Couto, “Por uma lusofonia partilhada,” in O entrelaçar das vozes mestiças, ed. Celina
Martins (São João do Estoril, Portugal: Principia, 2006), 418.
11. Mia Couto, O último vôo do flamingo (Lisbon: Caminho, 2000), 11.
12. José Eduardo Agualusa, “An Interview,” Words Without Borders, http://­wordswithoutborders.
org/article/an-interview-with-jos-eduardo-agualusa.
13. Antonio Lobo Antunes, Fado Alexandrino (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1983), translated by
Gregory Rabassa, Fado Alexandrino (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990) and O esplendor de
Portugal (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1997), translated by Rhett McNeil, The Splendor of Portugal
(Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2011).

This content downloaded from 128.83.63.20 on Fri, 29 Jul 2016 00:48:08 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

CLS 50.2_04_Beebee.indd 218 30/04/13 3:24 PM