Um estranho em Goa [A Stranger in Goa]: Transitive Journey to a Sought-After Orient

Abstract

The work of José Eduardo Agualusa (Huambo, Angola, 1960) has the particularity of neither being limited to a single genre (his bibliography includes novels, short stories, chronicles, narrative notes and some poetry) nor to a single theme or area, be it spatial, temporal or cultural. Indeed, his characters are usually marked by geographical or historical discontinuities and intersecting trajectories within a "perspective of contact"  that enablesconnections and interactions fo various sorts between different subjects in diverse spatio-temporal frames. Such fictional arborescences, especially present in his novels, though not always to a degree that generates cosmopolitan ramifications, construct transitive subjects and generate transcultural meanings. Um Estranho em Goa [A Stranger in Goa] is a case in point. Oscillating between the travel narrative and the fictionalisation of the real, the novel reinvents Goan identity in various ways, bringing onto the literary scene oriental exchanges and interlinkages and recovering the margins of political and ideological representations of the other, never losing sight of its otherness, in other words its potential as a site of diversity.