Abstract

Phillip Rothwell’s  interpretation of Mia Couto’s work wages on rupture, that is to say, what he assays on by impugning the traditional boundaries between man and woman, between truth, lie or falsehood, between tradition and modernity, between written and spoken and, from there, to aspire towards  to the “identification” of a country of multiple cultures. In this light, and given the favourable global context towards postmodern readings of literary works, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the local context of post-independence Mozambique and the writer's commitment to nation building, Phillip Rothwell’s reading of Mia Couto as a post-modern nationalist proves to be highly political in the noblest sense of the word.

Phillip Rothwell’s book, written with great essayistic elegance and sophistication, and built from solid, exciting and innovative theoretical bases, seems to constantly ask: how far can we go? How far can literature go? The answer is necessarily fragmentary, but brings us to the best we can hope for in an essay - a demanding thought that engages us, readers, into demanding thinking.
 

Phillip Rothwell is Full Professor of Portuguese Studies - King John II Professor of Portuguese - at Oxford University, member of Saint Peter's College and director of the European Humanities Research Centre at the same university. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he was a member of Trinity College. Rothwell was also professor at Rutgers University in the United States. In addition to several articles published in journals and collections of essays, he is author of A Canon of Empty Fathers: Paternity in Portuguese Narrative (Bucknell University Press), organizer of volume 10 of the journal Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies, dedicated to Mozambique, “Reevaluating Mozambique”, and volume 15 of the same journal dedicated to Angola, “Remembering Angola” and co-organizer of volume 84 of the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (with Cláudia Pazos Alonso) dedicated to the work of Mia Couto and organized, with Hilary Owen, the book of essays Sexual/Textual Empires: Gender and Marginality in Lusophone Africa (Bristol: Lusophone Studies).