The Work of Literature and the Worlding of Contemporary Fiction in Portuguese. An Introduction

This work situates cultural labour (the productive, material and transformative dimension of cultural production) as a central concern of contemporary literary production in Portuguese. During the last decade, debates over the space that literatures in Portuguese occupy within world-literary paradigms have been the object of renewed attention, with major contributions making a case for a critical reconsideration of issues of positionality, cultural commodification and the power dynamics at play in the production, circulation and consumption of textual and literary texts written in Portuguese. Different in aims, scope and theoretical underpinnings, these voices share a sense of discomfort resulting from the marginal role that literature in Portuguese has historically played within a world-literary field that still privileges texts written in English and/or produced within Western European and North American contexts. There is also agreement on the fact that the issue goes beyond including a few case studies in the canon of world-literature. As the editors of the Via Atlântica special issue on world-literature and the modern world-system point out:Accepting this challenge, but also taking existing considerations in new directions, this book argues for a materialist understanding of contemporary narrative in Portuguese that takes account of the strategies adopted in order to negotiate the locus of enunciation and the social relevance of narrative forms in ways that go beyond the autonomous field of literary production. Our aim is not to add an alternative interpretation of the world-literary system to a fertile debate that goes back decades. Instead, this project expands existing debates on literary production and circulation by highlighting that the shifting conditions which regulate the entrance of Portuguese texts to world-literary frameworks also imply a retooling of the strategies, roles and responsibilities of cultural producers in general and writers in particular. This is so, because literature nowadays clearly exceeds the function of expressing a belonging to stable, static national identities, nor does it seem reducible either to an abstract sense of disorientation resulting from (and ascribable to) conflict-free, unproblematic ideas of transnational and global circulation. As the chapters included in this volume will demonstrate, writers play an active role in the “worlding” of contemporary literature in Portuguese. For, as we will see, formal innovation and cultural adscription are often paired with a renewed interest in questioning the active role that literature plays in processes of social reproduction. Such interest is materialised through a set of strategies and movements that are commonly overlooked in considerations on world-literature written in Portuguese and debates on literature, cultural work and creative economies. These strategies and movements are the main object of study of this volume.