Categoria: Representations

The island of utopia

Posted on 25 de Julho, 2023 | By caparicio

Few places depend as much on their vision as islands, where everything happens as if thing and representation were one, by an operation that would immediately make the reality correspond to its image. We see the island being in the world at the same time as being born to its intellection via a whole imaginary. We can see it at the same time as we discern it. One of the reasons for its myth is its centrality. If the island is, from antiquity, presented as a navel (omphalos), it is not only because it represents, in a small way, the Ecumene surrounded by water, but also because it indicates an origin. Now, this cradle of the island, where mythology gives birth to Zeus (on Crete), Apollo (on Delos) and Aphrodite (on Kythera), is also the tomb painted by Böcklin in his Island of the Dead. An idea of origin thus leads to the notion of a cycle. And to speak of the umbilicus also leads to the cordon that is the island, once considered not in its singularity but in its globality as an archipelago, where centrality gives way to decentring. So much so that we never finish going around the island, which is both total and finite, fragmentary and discontinuous. Therein lies an explanation for the success of the island archetype: its ambivalence, or rather its reversibility.

It is by inversion that the term “archipelago” (Aigaion pelagos, etymologically the Aegean Sea) today designates not the container “sea” but the content “islands”, or that conversely the word “Mediterranean” did not designate the sea of the same name but, literally, what lies in the middle of the land. And it is in the same way that utopia, a genre impossible to dissociate from the island with which it was born, cannot be envisaged without simultaneously postulating its spatial reality and its fiction of a place situated nowhere. Ou-topos, in other words “non-place”. But to pose the negation is – such is its paradox – to deny it. It is not that utopia is not in any place, it is that it is the place of its non-place. It is that its very nature is to be other, and its nowhere an elsewhere, or even a nowhere-where – a fictional reality conditioned by a void where the best of all possible worlds (eu-topos) will be constituted, on a play on words[1] .

We know that the pages of the manuscript that are supposed to inform us about the coordinates of Thomas More’s island of Utopia (1516) have disappeared, that Raphael Hythloday, the traveller and Utopian narrator of the book, is unconscious during his arrival on an unknown land, and that, as if this were not enough, the coughing fit of a servant prevents us from hearing his position for the first time in Book I through words that are only whispered. The place of Utopia will remain without location. The narrative alone, after the narrator has left the island, will attest to its truth, through fiction. It is what restores it that institutes it. Utopia makes discourse a condition of space, and it is the eponymous book here that qualifies not only the island but also, soon, the entire utopian genre.

A first utopian act is to cut the isthmus attaching the future island to the continent. This movement of geographical foundation (a cut immediately followed by a fence) is completed by the naming of the place of the sort established after the name of its founder, Utopus, with which it merges as a place founded on what names it, a place whose configuration is presented in the form of an amphitheatre and constitutes the island in scene. A strait succeeds the isthmus, inverting the ancient terrestrial continuity into a solution of liquid continuity. A rock, “visible from far away”, then achieves a reduplication by diminutive nesting. (This “abyssal” device is redoubled by the mention of an “immense” gulf in the form of a “great lake” inside). In the centre of the island (in its “navel”): a city acting as a capital. Finally, a string of lighthouses spread out over the entire island territory gives the island complete visibility. “(…) Thomas More’s island offers itself (…) entirely as a map“[2] .

Foundation effect: the island is a new world. Condensation effect: the island is a small world. Reduction effect: the island is a mirror world. Naming effect: the island is a monogram[3] . Appropriation effect: the island is made suitable for the achievement of power and knowledge. Modelling effect: the island is a pictorial world that must be seen, at all points, as a map, a scene, a painting. But this other world of the island is our own, a Mundus alter et idem, as defined by the title of a utopia by Joseph Hall written in 1605: “The decisive criterion of insularity is the obligation to think of the island in its secondarity rather than in its singularity. Inseparable from the reference to what it is not, the theme of the island would necessarily stem from the dialectical link that it maintains with the continental space.[4]

This explains why the bipolarity, not only of utopia (no utopia without dystopia…), but of the signified of the island in general (edenic/apocalyptic, erotic/eremitic, historical/ideological, etc.) has no equivalent but its reversibility. This is why, instead of the notion of difference or gap, we will substitute the notion of neutral or interval. Or heterotopias: “kinds of counter-locations, kinds of effectively realised utopias in which the real locations, all the other real locations that can be found within culture, are at once represented, contested and inverted, kinds of places that are outside of all places, though they are indeed locatable.[5]

Éric Fougère

[1] See Louis Marin, Utopiques: jeux d’espaces, Paris, Éditons de Minuit, 1973.

[2] Jean-Michel Racault, Robinson & Company, aspects de l’insularité politique de Thomas More à Michel Tournier, Paris, Éditions Pétra, 2010, p. 28 (emphasis added).

[3] Monogram is the term used by Frank Lestringant to indicate the singularity of the island paradigm. See Le Livre des îles, atlas et récits insulaires de la Genèse à Jules Verne, Geneva, Droz, 2002, pp. 333-334.

[4] J.-M. Racault, Ibid, p. 16. Underlined in the text.

[5] Michel Foucault, “Des espaces autres”, lecture at the Cercle d’études architecturales (14 March 1967), in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, no. 5 (October 1984), pp. 46-49. Reprinted in Dits et écrits II, Paris, Quarto Gallimard 2001, p. 1574-1575.

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Island and Robinsonade

Posted on 25 de Julho, 2023 | By caparicio

Robinsonade is the name given to stories about deserted islands where castaways are thrown to live alone. A name (without a first name) that comes from the eponymous character from whom we have subtracted his second surname: Crusoe – an anglicised form of Kreutznaer, as Robinson’s German father was called when he came to settle in England. In this “Crusoe” we have three of the most reported directions of Daniel Defoe’s novel (1719)[1] . At the narratological level, a series of journeys before and after the one that leads Robinson to the island (where the itinerant structure is repeated) inscribes the narrative in a dimension of adventure and rupture (Crusoe/cruise). Another approach has seen the Robinsonade as a fable (admittedly realistic) inspired by an economic context in which Robinson can be seen as the puritanical representative of a booming individualism and capitalism[2] (kreuzer and cruzade are currencies whose names can be read implicitly in Crusoe’s name – especially the latter: it makes Robinson’s fortune on his plantations in Brazil) At the level of what Defoe himself calls an “allegorical” reading[3] , finally, some critics have made Robinson Crusoe, on the model of the “spiritual autobiographies” encouraged by Protestantism, a novel of repentance and conversion[4] (Crusoe/cross – the cross of a reconquest crusader, the trials thus undergone in order to merit salvation)

When Defoe makes Robinson say that all his reflections “are the exact history of a state of forced confinement which, in [his] real history, [he] represents by a confined retreat to an island”[5] , it is no longer clear what is biographical and what is allegorical. Beyond the interpretations aimed at considering Defoe’s novel as a cryptic autobiography, we would rather be faced with the invention of a myth at the source of innumerable rewritings among which stands out John M. Coetzee’s novel, Foe (1986), which makes the author of Robinson Crusoe, son of his works and father of the Robinsonade, a character at work in his own literary posterity[6] . There are two main reasons for this myth: an identification of the island space with existential experience (desert island = solitude) and of the starting situation with the notion of beginning (shipwreck = origin). However, just as there is a plurality of critical accesses to the

desert island narrative, there is also a great deal of ambiguity in this narrative, which remains enigmatic.

Equivocal, to begin with, is this island, which is supposed to be deserted: “it is […] by ceasing to be so that it becomes representable, the presence in its midst of a shipwrecked person being the only thing that can authorise its description”.[7] This trompe-l’œil origin of an arrival on the island, which is presented to us as a baptism and whose wreckage has all the makings of a technical Noah’s Ark authorising the identical reproduction of the old world, is biased. A double discrepancy prevents the beginning from being an absolute origin, as Robinson claims when he makes each year begin with the anniversary of his shipwreck. A gap between the internal chronological narrative and the Diary (written in the past tense, by the way!) that Robinson begins to keep when looking back on his arrival on the island. Another discrepancy, between the time on the island and “real” time, is the reason for the gap of one year when all the dates are counted, even though they are meticulously mentioned in the novel, and Robinson’s illness, which left him unconscious for several days, deprives him of the necessary credit for the name Robinson gives to Friday to indicate the day of his rescue.

One interest of Michel Tournier’s novel Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique (1967) is that it centres the island narrative on the invention of this other named Vendredi: “If Robinson Crusoe is a myth, then it can only be the myth of the origin of the other.[8] Nothing better prefigures this other than the footprint discovered one day on the shore by Robinson. This footprint is that of a single foot. The footprint is a testimony to loneliness to the extent that it prompts the character to make sure that it is not his own foot, and it is the hollowed-out mark of an Other whom he hopes for as a fellow human being and fears as a cannibal or possible enemy. The animals on the island (a billy goat, a parrot, etc.) fulfil an alter ego function in this respect, so that Robinson sometimes believes he sees himself in them, sometimes distances himself from them – in both cases forcing himself to think about his otherness.

One island always hides another. This explains not only the interlocking spaces of the “island within the island” shared by the majority of Robinsonades (antres, enclosures, arenas or pools) but also the simultaneous presence of at least two “codes”, heuristic (island to be cleared), hermeneutic (island to be deciphered), well demonstrated by Roland Barthes in relation to L’Île mystérieuse (1874)[9] and allowing us to distinguish between an island narrative – appropriation of the island on the surface – and an island novel – elucidation of a secret of the island in depth. There is a secret when the always forever lost but always forever already there anteriority of the island narrative is internalised in such a way as to suggest island is deserted it is because it is virgin to any writing and that it is therefore up to each rewriting to invent its other island by founding its own origin on it[10] .

Éric Fougère

[1] See Éric Fougère, Les Voyages et l’ancrage, représentation de l’espace insulaire à l’âge classique, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1995, p. 61.

[2] See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, London, Chatto and Windus, 1957; ‘Robinson Crusoe as a Myth’, in Michael Shinagel ed, Robinson Crusoe, New York, London, Norton & Company, 1975.

[3] In his preface to Robinson Crusoe’s Réflexions sérieuses (1720), Paris, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1972, p. 594.

[4] See George A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1965; John Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1966.

[5] D. Defoe, ibid (emphasis added).

[6] See Jean-Paul Engélibert, La Postérité de Robinson Crusoé, un mythe littéraire de la modernité, Geneva, Droz, 1997.

[7] Jean-Michel Racault, “Le paradoxe de l’île déserte”, in Lise Andries ed, Robinson, Paris, Éditions Autrement, 1996, p. 104.

[8] Jean-Pascal Le Goff, Robinson Crusoe ou l’invention d’autrui, Paris, Klincksieck, 2003, p. 176.

[9] See R. Barthes, “Par où commencer ?”, in Nouveaux Essais critiques, Paris, Points Seuil, 1972, p. 145-155.

[10] See É. Fougère, ‘Un point sur la reprise insulaire’ in Maria de Jesus Cabral and Ana Clara Santos eds, Les Possibilités d’une île, Paris, Petra, 2014, pp. 15-32; ‘Pierre Benoit, récit d’île et roman de l’île’, in Carnets, revue électronique d’études françaises, II^e series, no. 3 (2015).

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José Agostinho Baptista

Posted on 1 de Abril, 2023 | By caparicio

“For you I arrived and leave./My home is where you are” (Baptista, 1992: 9). In José Agostinho Baptista the dimension of the island-place opens up to the reader’s world, through personal conundrums. With an insular vocation – physical and spiritual – the subject presents itself as a wandering geography, measured by the mountains, the sea or the silence of primordial Madeira. The island moves like a home through other geographical mosaics.

With a pronounced mnemonic mark, the departure and arrival of this poetry will always be that idyllic place, between the romantic “locus amoenus” and “locus horribilis”, cohabited by the sea, by the father, by love and, above all, by the island-subject, in the sense of a non-place, becoming the place “where you are”. The writing process of José Agostinho Baptista, with a tendency to recover a romantic model, “is not only the process of the feeling or of the memory, it is the writing process itself that becomes a book ” (Magalhães, 1989: 256).

Born in Funchal (August 15th, 1948), José Agostinho Baptista is recognised as one of the most important Portuguese poets of his generation. For a long period of his life, he lived in Lisbon, having been a translator of essential authors, such as W. B. Yeats or Walt Whitman, and a journalist, in various newspapers of the Portuguese capital, A República and Diário de Lisboa. Previously he collaborated with Comércio do Funchal. Some time ago he returned to Madeira.

To approach José Agostinho Baptista, we must speak of his telluric relationship with Madeira, rarely harmonious, but simultaneously, of a clear dependence. We believe that the island is the path of a poetics marked by the search/epiphany of the subject’s identity, full of its insular mark, the telluric drive. There is a clear identification of the poetic subject/island with an initiatory journey through the nostalgia of a primordial, pure and suffering love.

For Ana Margarida Falcão Seixas, José Agostinho Baptista reveals a strong presence of nostalgia in his writing that “tells, in various episodes and in different narrative dimensions, the exile of a subject in himself, body and mind unfolded in multiple variants that sacralize the dream, the reverie and the traces of the past, providing the enunciation of representations essentially derived from absence” (Seixas, 2003: 398), which combined with the telluric dimension reveals the islander feeling. The telluric drive, verbalized in the sentimental entwining between subject and island, “He was an island, the endless basalt” (Baptista, 1992: 19), scales the perspective of insularity in themes dear to Portuguese literature, such as exile, unrequited love, madness/reverie, nostalgia and memory.

The father figure, linked to the memory of the primordial island, is also another leitmotif, as is the case in Agora e na hora da nossa morte, “Nobody shuts up the stormy rivers deep/in my eyes,/when I think of the worms, the viscosities/which seek you through the satin” (Baptista, 1998: 102), a long (non-)prayer until the final “Amen”, or in poems like “Memória”, in Deste lado onde.

Other places take over the face of this primordial island, the most significant being Mexico: “Mexico, which is characterised by its most perennial essence, its gods, its parallel tattoos, which, in the symbolic and metaphorical universe of the “I”, configure this new land of the fathers, a vast homeland, where the “I” spreads its imaginary, in the romantic perspective of vastness and of recreating the originality of the first island”1 .

José Tolentino Mendonça speaks of the poetry of José Agostinho Baptista as fundamental to the understanding of Madeira, “the roughness of its time, the unbridled rapture of the landscape, the tireless streams, the mystery of the fruits, the helpless truth of its silence”2, because “The island is all the land. And, in the dark secret of its name, it holds the most significant ambivalence”3.

Of José Agostinho Baptista’s books, we highlight: Deste lado onde (1976), O último romântico (1981), Morrer no sul (1983), Autoretrato (1986), O centro do universo (1989), Paixão e cinzas (1992), Canções da terra distante (1994), Debaixo do azul sobre o vulcão (1995), Agora e na hora da nossa morte (1998), Biografia (2000), Afectos (2002), Anjos caídos (2003), Esta voz é quase vento (2004), Quatro luas (2006), Filho pródigo (2008), O pai, a mãe e o silêncio dos irmãos (2009) and Caminharei pelo vale da sombra (2011).

The public recognition of his work includes distinctions such as: the Grand Officer of the Order of Infante D. Henrique (2001 – Presidency of the Republic) and the Medal of Distinction awarded on the day of the Autonomous Region of Madeira (2015 – Regional Government of Madeira). Other prizes worth mentioning are the Pen Club – Poetry (2003), for Anjos Caídos, and the Grand Prize for Poetry CTT – Correios de Portugal (2004), for Esta Voz é Quase o Vento.

Paulo César Vieira Figueira

[1] Paulo Figueira (2020). José Agostinho Baptista, “le sentiment de soi”. In TRANSLOCAL. Culturas Contemporâneas Locais e Urbanas, nº 5.

Digital access: https://translocal.cm-funchal.pt/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/JoseAgostinhoBaptista-le-sentiment-de-soit5.pdf. Vd. José Agostinho Baptista, Debaixo do azul sobre o vulcão.

2 José Tolentino Mendonça, “Um sopro, uma leve pancada no coração”, in A Phala nº 81. Digital access: https://joseagostinhobaptista.com/a-phala.html.

3 José Tolentino Mendonça, “Um sopro, uma leve pancada no coração”, in A Phala nº 81. Digital access: https://joseagostinhobaptista.com/a-phala.html.

Bibliography

Falcão, Ana Margarida (2011). O Funchal na poesia insular do séc. XV ao séc. XX. In Funchal (d)escrito: ensaios sobre representações literárias da cidade. Vila Nova de Gaia: 7 Dias 6 Noites, 77-113.

Figueira, Paulo (2020). José Agostinho Baptista, “le sentiment de soi”. In TRANSLOCAL. Culturas Contemporâneas Locais e Urbanas, nº 5. Funchal: UMa-CIERL/CMF/IA. Digital access:

https://translocal.cm-funchal.pt/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/JoseAgostinhoBaptista-le-sentiment-de-soit5.pdf.

Consulted on 21-Dec-2021.

Figueira, Paulo (2008). Percursos da subjetividade pós-modernista: um contributo para a análise das poéticas de José Agostinho Baptista e Eduardo White [masters dissertation]. Funchal: Universidade da Madeira.

Magalhães, Joaquim Manuel (1989). Um pouco da morte. Lisboa: Presença.

Mendonça, José Tolentino (2000). Um sopro, uma leve pancada no coração. In A Phala – José Agostinho Baptista, nº 81. Digital access: https://joseagostinhobaptista.com/a-phala.html. Consulted on 21-Dec-2021.

Seixas, Ana Margarida Falcão (2003). Os Novos Shâmanes. Um Contributo para o Estudo da Narratividade na Poesia Portuguesa mais recente [dissertation]. Funchal: Universidade da Madeira.

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Like a castaway. Time, island and sea

Posted on 24 de Fevereiro, 2023 | By caparicio

The film Cast away, by Robert Zemeckis (2000), tells the story of Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks), a systems engineer ironically expert in time efficiency, who works for the company Federal Express (FedEx) in order to make deliveries as fast as possible and who, after a tragic plane crash, is the only survivor, ending up on a small desert island lost in the Pacific. Starting from the analysis of the film under the perspective of personal identity, the relationship with time and the role played by the island and the sea, we intend to reflect on the emotional and psychological transformations of the protagonist, whose name indicates what will happen in the film: “C. (see) No land”.

From William Shakespeare’s The Storm (1610-1611) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) and Byron Haskin’s science fiction film Robinson Crusoe (1964), artists from various artistic fields have been intrigued by the idea of a human being marooned on a desert island. Tom Hanks mentioned that one of the reasons he wanted to make the film was to reinvent the concept “stuck on a desert island”, adapting it to the present time.1

And in fact the narrative construction is based on the division into two worlds that appear as completely opposed and apparently irreconcilable: on the one hand the globalised western world, in which Chuck Nolan, for professional reasons, lives obsessed with the need to control time and make it faster and more efficient. The logo of his transport company consists of angel wings under which we read “The world on time”. On the other hand, we have nature in a wild state, the power of the sea and of the storms, a desert island on which the protagonist has to learn to survive with the food and drinking water he finds.

A raccord for a dark shot, after Chuck’s first fight against a stormy sea, just after the crash of the plane he was on, shows us the passage from this urban, chaotic world, prisoner of time, to a wild world, of untamed nature, where time may well cease to exist. Through the light of lightning in the middle of the night, we see land, through the exhausted eyes of the protagonist. This dichotomy is accentuated by the very sound of the film, so that in the most devastating sequences, instead of being flooded with music, the entire soundtrack and even human language ceases, to allow the sounds of nature to dominate everything. Here, too, there is an absolute contrast with the part of the film before the disaster, in which Chuck speaks at a fast,

uninterrupted, anxious pace, only for us on the island now to hear his desperate cries, getting no

response: “Hello? Anybody?”. Almost until the end of the film, the sounds of nature, the sea and the wind will predominate, until the moment when we hear out loud the thoughts of the protagonist.

However, as noted above, only apparently are these two worlds irreconcilable. The awareness of time allows the protagonist to figure out how to leave the island safely. It is by marking on the stone of his cave the passage of the seasons that he realises when the best time is to try to leave the island, with the right tide and winds, in a makeshift boat. In that sequence he comments to Wilson, the volleyball that becomes his best friend, whose face is painted with his own blood: “We live and die by time, didn’t we? Let’s not commit the sin of turning our backs to time.”

Not only the volleyball (Wilson), but also the watch with Kelly’s photo, his fiancée, the island and the sea itself take on such an intense symbolic charge that they end up being personified, thus making use of prosopopoeia. All these elements help Chuck to survive. This emotional and social survival is just as important as physical survival. Before leaving for what would be a journey of almost no return, Chuck and his fiancée exchange Christmas presents, he gives her, among other things, an engagement ring and she gives him a grandfather clock with Chuck’s favourite picture of her. In a close-up the watch is shown with Chuck always setting it to Memphis time, their time: it is this need to control time that also helps him to save himself, for it is this imprisonment to memories and the past that will allow him to keep hoping for a possible reunion.

The construction of a personal narrative, as well as its permanent re-elaboration, are decisive in fostering the feeling of personal continuity in a determined time and space. The continuous generation of otherness, of different realities, reifies and establishes personal identity, structuring it as an unstable intertwinement between fiction and reality. Hence Bernardo Soares’ view : “Yes, tomorrow, or when Fate says, there will be an end to what pretended in me that it was me”. (Pessoa, 1982: 177). These reflections help to understand the importance of turning to the past to be able to survive and, also, the creation of another – Wilson – to be able to establish a dialogue that would allow survival, because “in the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.” (Gonçalves, 2002: 60)

Thus the desert island appears as a metaphor of life in this film that begins and ends with a high-angle shot over a crossroads, or were not Zemeckis an heir of the best classic American cinema, based on good screenwriters. A cycle closes, but the possibilities of choosing a certain path never end, or were we not all castaways learning how to survive on this island of ours.

Ana Bela Morais

[1] Cf. Cast Away in IMDB (Internet Movie Database), available on: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0162222/trivia/?ref_=tt_trv_trv. Accessed on July 17, 2022.

Bibliography:

Blum, Hester. May 2010. “The Prospect of Oceanic Studies” PMLA, Vol. 125, No. 3. Modern Language Association: pp. 670-677

Oscar Gonçalves, Óscar. 2002. Living narratively. A psicoterapia como adjectivação da experiência. 2nd ed., Coimbra: Quarteto Editora.

Pessoa, Fernando. 1982. Livro do desassossego, by Bernardo Soares. Vol. 1. Lisbon: Ática.

Steinberg, Philip E. 2013. “Of other seas: metaphors and materialities in maritime regions,” Atlantic Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2. Routledge: pp. 156-16.

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The Island in Northern-American and English 20th and 21st – centuries Paranormal Horror Films and TV-Shows

Posted on 26 de Novembro, 2022 | By caparicio

[In Cinema, Horror]: Although prolific in representations in horror cinema and television shows, the island as an object of horror has yet to be further studied. In the 20^th and 21^st centuries, the island has been the stage for numerous horror films and television shows. Notably, the island is generally represented as the stage for horror, very rarely being the source of horror itself. However, there are some notable examples where the island itself represents the horror whether because of its inhabitants, for example in Doomwatch (Sasdy 1972) or The Wicker Man (Hardy 1973), or due to its fauna and flora, like Jaws (Spielberg 1975), and The Bay (Levinson 2012). The characteristics that the island evokes can be read in a binary. Instead of representing a private paradise, these islands usually represent individual (or group) seclusion that brings about the need for survival. The island often functions as the representation of exclusion from ‘normal’ society and the characters’ inability to reach it safely, often connecting it to the idea of the supernatural, such as in Blood Beach (Bloom 1981), The Woman in Black (Watkins 2012), an adaptation of Susan Hill’s homonymous work (1983), and Sweetheart (Dillard 2019), or of madness, for example in Shutter Island (Scorsese 2010) or The Lighthouse (Eggers 2019). It also evokes the feelings of imprisonment, limited resources, strange or foreign life forms, and a place where privacy can mean the concealment of horror to outsiders, such as Midnight Mass (Flanagan 2021), which evokes religious horror that is kept at bay from the rest of the world and contained because it is set on an island, or Fantasy Island (Wadlow 2020), where the notion of paradisiac and idyllic islands is subverted into its dystopic opposite. The island in horror films has been studied from a postcolonial perspective (Williams 1983; Martens 2021), particularly concerning films of Northern-American or British production that set the horror on foreign islands, namely those which are not European and white-centred, focusing, for instance, on the representation of African-Caribbean religions and practices and the zombie figure. It has also been studied through the lens of diabolical isolation and as the site for scientific experiment, like The Island of Lost Souls (Kenton 1934), the adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Mureau (1896), creation and/or concealment, as in Sedgwick’s study about ‘Nazi Islands’ (2018). However, it is from Australia that the study of the island as a horror site seems to be more fertile, specifically studies of ‘Ozploitation’, that is, films that explore the Australian island landscape as a product of colonisation and of disconnection from the (main)land (Simpson 2010; Culley 2020; Ryan and Ellison 2020).

M. Francisca Alvarenga

Bibliography:

CULLEY, NINA. “The Isolation at the Heart of Australian Horror.” Kill Your Darlings, Jul-Dec 2020, 2020, pp. 263-265. Informit, search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.630726095716522.

MARTENS, EMIEL. “The 1930s Horror Adventure Film on Location in Jamaica: ‘Jungle Gods’, ‘Voodoo Drums’ and ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ in the ‘Secret Places of Paradise Island’. Humanities, vol. 10, no. 2, 2021, doi: 10.3390/h10020062.

RYAN, MARK DAVID, AND ELISABETH WILSON. “Beaches in Australian Horror Films: Sites of Fear and Retreat.” Writing the Australian Beach. Local Site, Global Idea, edited by Elisabeth Ellison and Donna Lee Brien. 2020. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

SEDGWICK, LAURA. “Islands Of Horror: Nazi Mad Science and The Occult in Shock Waves (1977), Hellboy (2004), And The Devil’s Rock (2011).” Post Script, special issue on Islands and Film, vol. 37, no. 2/3, 2018, pp. 27-39. Proquest, www.proquest.com/openview/00ccdba578653d3fe1a5b2e7b5bfb0b5/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=44598. Accessed January 27, 2022.

SIMPSON, CATHERINE. “Australian eco-horror and Gaia’s revenge: animals, eco-nationalism and the ‘new nature’.” Studies in Australasian Cinema, vol. 4, no. 1, 2010, pp. 43-54, doi: 10.1386/sac.4.1.43_1.

WILLIAMS, TONY. “White Zombie. Haitian Horror.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, vol. 28, 1983, pp. 18-20. Jump Cut, www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC28folder/WhiteZombie.html. Accessed January 27, 2022.

Filmography:

Blood Beach. Directed by Jeffrey Bloom, The Jerry Gross Organization, 1981.

Doomwatch. Directed by Peter Sasdy, BBC, 1972.

Fantasy Island. Directed by Jeff Wadlow, Columbia Pictures, 2020.

Jaws. Directed by Steven Spielberg, Universal Studies, 1975.

Midnight Mass. Directed by Mike Flanagan, Netflix, 2021.

Shutter Island. Directed by Martin Scorsese, Paramount Pictures, 2010.

Sweetheart. Directed by Justin Dillard, Blumhouse Productions, 2019.

The Bay. Directed by Barry Levinson, Baltimore Pictures, 2012.

The Island of Lost Souls. Directed by Erle C. Kenton, Paramount Pictures, 1932.

The Lighthouse. Directed by Max Eggers, A24, 2019.

The Woman in Black. Directed by James Watkins, Hammer Film Productions, 2012.

Wicker Man. Directed by Robin Hardy, British Lion Films, 1973.

Further Reading

CHIBNALL, STEVE, AND JULIAN PETLEY (eds.). British Horror Cinema. British Popular Cinema. 2002. London and New York: Routledge.

HUTCHINGS, PETER. Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film. 1993. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

—. Historical Dictionary of Horror Cinema, 2^nd edition. 2018. London: Rowman & Littlefield.

—. The A to Z of Horror Cinema. 2009. Lanham, Toronto, Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press.

LEEDER, MURRAY. Horror Film. A Critical Introduction. 2018. New York, London, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury.

SMITH, GARY A. Uneasy Dreams: The Golden Age of British Horror Films, 1956-1976. 2000. Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company.

WALLER, GREGORY A. (ed.). American Horrors. Essays on the Modern American Horror Film. 1987. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

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Viagens, de João dos Reis Gomes

Posted on 24 de Novembro, 2022 | By caparicio

Viagens appears in the travel literature of Madeiran authors as the posthumous compilation of three works by João dos Reis Gomes, Através da França, Suíça e Itália, Três Capitais de Espanha and Através da Alemanha. The particularity of this work is that could be understood as an exemplar of travel literature by a Madeiran author about trips made outside the insular space or the portuguese space.

We believe that this type of travel literature produced by authors from Madeira who travel to continental spaces allows, in the case of João dos Reis Gomes, the opening of another research suggestion that is the vision of the European continental space by an islander from a territory of the current European outermost region. The texts by João dos Reis Gomes also suggest the interpretation of the tourist phenomenon at the beginning of the 20th century, linked to religious, leisure or medicinal and therapeutic reasons, something also experienced in the insular space.

In this context, the testimony of an islander’s journey in a continental space reveals a measure of description characteristic of someone that lives on an island and could measure the world through it, which allows us to envision insularity as an opening to the world.

In Viagens, João dos Reis Gomes, motivated by the knowledge of the other, offers the reader the perspective of the traveling writer and not a simple tourist commentary: “apodera-se do ritmo e da técnica do episódio e do relato histórico, assegurando a cor local, através de um olhar testemunha, subjetivo. Surge, então, a categoria do escritor viajante, com uma dupla função: ser um olhar que escreve e, ao mesmo tempo, um escritor” (Mello, 2010: 145). Regarding the three books that make up the volume Viagens, we talk about an experience resulting from the second Madeiran pilgrimage to European Marian shrines, a leisure trip to Spain and a trip for health and leisure reasons to Germany.

Através da França, Suíça e Itália was published as a book in 1929, based on the chronicles of João dos Reis Gomes first published in the Diário da Madeira, in 1926, the year of the second Madeiran pilgrimage. We think that the second Madeiran pilgrimage is part of the context of the great transnational pilgrimages that take place all over Europe, influenced by the climate of the apparitions of Fátima, of the canonization of Margaret Mary Alacoque, on May 13, 1920, by Pope Benedict XV, and by the large number of pilgrims to the Lourdes cave, a phenomenon of faith, facilitated by Catholic groups.

However, we are talking about a story that is a non religious testimony, because João dos Reis Gomes confesses that he does not feel able to address religious matters and writes because his friends asked him to do so: “Tinham-me alguns amigos pedido, com penhorante insistência, que lhes desse umas breves impressões desta peregrinação” (Reis Gomes, 2020: 23). We believe that one of the main points of interest of this travel testimony is the demonstration of the author’s conservative thinking and the reflections on politics, society and culture, taking into account that João dos Reis Gomes is a military man and an islander who is faced with different ways of being. We can also add a certain admiration for the Italian political order, especially if we are confronted with the events in Portugal and the precarious situation of the First Republic: “O viajante sente a perfeita comunhão do povo com o salvador da Itália [Mussolini]” (Reis Gomes, 2020: 157).

As an island traveler, nostalgia takes hold during some episodes of the author and his entourage, as is the case of the comparison with the Côte d’Azur and the mountains of Switzerland: “O espetáculo [the swiss landscape] é, na verdade, grandioso e comovedoramente evocativo. Ninguém deixou de pensar, mais vivamente, na sua casinha da alterosa ilha” (Reis Gomes, 2020: 195).

Três Capitais de Espanha is the report of a private trip, dedicated to the son of João dos Reis Gomes, Álvaro Reis Gomes, “companheiro nestas digressões” (Reis Gomes, 2020: 227). The journey of the traveling writer is intertwined with Spanish history, from the North, Burgos, through Toledo, conquered by Alfonso VI, to the imperial city of Seville. The traveling writer’s testimony is based on art and culture and the subjectivity of admiration: “Mas, porque escrevo, então?! Primeiro, por uma imposição de espírito ou, melhor, de sensibilidade, que me não deixa conter as emoções colhidas – […]; segundo, porque, dado o direito de admirar, na apreciação de qualquer facto, país ou obra de arte, há sempre um certo fator subjetivo” (Reis Gomes, 2020: 229).

Através da Alemanha is a book of 1949, based on the chronicles first published in Diário da Madeira, in 1931. The purpose of the book edition is to witness to the reader the German civilization before the Second World War: “apenas elementos para um confronto entre o passado [1931] e o presente [1949]; confronto que, por tão desolador como expressivo, oxalá pudesse contribuir – ingénua utopia! – para adoçar a alma e prevenir a consciência” (Reis Gomes, 2020: 283).

In addition to approaching a country far from the European periphery, João dos Reis Gomes’ interests lie in Neubabelsberg, the visit to the UFA studio (Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft) and the contemplation of cinematographic art, the ascent of the Rhine (where he found inspiration to his book A Lenda de Loreley, contada por um latino) and the emotion, as journalist and writer, in the visit of Gutenberg’s museum, in Mainz.

For all these reasons, we believe that Viagens is an example of the island traveler writer and the outside perspective he adds to the island world, due to the awareness that these are different worlds. The themes discussed reflect that insularity is part of a global world, in which events that occur in a given space and time are interconnected and act on several other geographic points, whether of a political, cultural, philosophical or scientific nature.

Paulo César Vieira Figueira

References

Collot, Michel (2014). Pour une Géographie Littéraire. Paris: Éditions Corti.

Cristóvão, Fernando (2002). Condicionantes Culturais da Literatura de Viagens. Coimbra: Almedina.

Mello, Maria Elizabeth Chaves de (2010). O relato de viagem – narradores, entre a memória, o fictício e o imaginário. In Dalva Calvão e Norimar Júdice (Org.). Gragoatá, 28. Niterói: Universidade Federal Fluminense. 141-152.

Nucera, Domenico (2002). Los viajes y la literatura. In Armando Gnisci (Org.). Introducción a la Literatura Comparada. Barcelona: Editorial Crítica. 241-290.

Pita, Gabriel de Jesus (1985). Decadência e queda da Primeira República analisada na Imprensa Madeirense da época. In António Loja (Dir.). Atlântico, 3. Funchal: Eurolitho. 194-209.

Reis Gomes, João dos (1949). Através da Alemanha. Lisboa: Livraria Clássica.

Reis Gomes, João dos (1929). Através da França, Suíça e Itália. Lisboa: Livraria Clássica.

Reis Gomes, João dos (1931). Três Capitais de Espanha: Burgos-Toledo-Sevilha. Funchal: Diário da Madeira.

Reis Gomes, João dos (2020). Viagens. Funchal: Imprensa Académica.

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Historical Novels – João dos Reis Gomes

Posted on 24 de Novembro, 2022 | By caparicio

The historical novels of João dos Reis Gomes correspond to three titles, A filha de Tristão das Damas (1909 and 1946), O anel do Imperador (1934) and O cavaleiro de Santa Catarina (1942), which focus on political, historical and cultural issues and local traditions. From the point of view of literary technique, these are not innovative novels, clearly influenced by the structure of the romantic historical novel model.

The relationship of these works by João dos Reis Gomes with insularity, specifically with the construction of Madeiran identity, takes place in a perspective in which regionalism and the affirmation of regions begins to be a reality in Europe.

Born in France, in the mid-19th century, regionalism influenced the struggle for emancipation in many regions, including Madeira (Vieira, 2001: 144). The Madeiran intellectual elite sought to legitimize the struggle for greater visibility of the archipelago, through the recovery of historical references, traditions and folkloric traits that supported this insular identity: “Tão pouco uma classe política, alheada ou desconhecedora do passado histórico terá possibilidades de fazer passar e vingar o seu discurso político” (Vieira, 2001: 143).

The insular identity difference starts to be built by the generations of the beginning of the 20th century, emphasizing History, other sciences and Literature: “estas gerações, com evidentes influências regionalistas, procuraram, através da história, da literatura, da ciência, a construção e validação de um panteão regional sobre o qual assentasse uma marca de diferença” (Figueira, 2021: 130)[1].

It is in this context that A filha de Tristão das Damas is published, in 1909. The first self-styled Madeiran historical novel has as its central point the help of the third donee of Funchal, Simão Gonçalves da Câmara, in the conquest of Safim, by Portugal. This motive serves to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Madeira’s intervention, as one of the archipelago’s historical episodes, as well as to present a subtle critique of the administrative autonomy of 1901. The publicity of Portuguese foreign policy’s commitment to the maintenance of the African Empire is also relevant. In fact, in 1946, the date of the second edition of the work, in addition to the regionalist aspect, it is again the assumption of Portugal as a colonial power, outside the sphere of emerging powers (USA and USSR), that guides the publication of this historical novel. In 1962, the novel is published again, but in fascicles by the Diário de Notícias do Funchal, with the aim of defending the Guerra do Ultramar (Overseas War) and the legitimation of the Portuguese Empire.

O anel do Imperador tells the story of Napoleon’s passage through Funchal, during his second exile, this time to the island of Saint Helena. The question of this historical episode allied to the fictional visit of Miss Isabel de S. to the French Emperor created a popular tradition fixed in the novel by João dos Reis Gomes. Behind the fiction there is, however, the propaganda of the figure of Salazar, similar to the episode of Napoleon in Madeira, seeking to present the figure of a sensitive political leader who deserves the acceptance of his Madeiran peers. It should be remembered that, in the 1930s, between the government of the military and the definitive rise of the Estado Novo, the episode of Revolta da Madeira, a political-military insurrection against the government of the military dictatorship, deepened the atmosphere between Madeira and the capital, in addition to the monopoly laws in relation to flour and milk, at the time, important industries in the archipelago.

Salazarism, in its propaganda action, sought to welcome the Madeiran elites into its midst, in a climate of harmony between the archipelago and the Government, in which the regionalist slope was exponentiated according to the homeland.

O cavaleiro de Santa Catarina offers the reader an account of the life and legend of Henrique Alemão, “sesmeiro da Madalena do Mar”, whose identity is believed to be that of Ladislaus III, the Polish king who disappeared in the Battle of Varna (1444).

The author, with this book, in addition to the attempt to preserve a heritage buffeted by the 1939 alluvium in Madalena do Mar, seeks to explore the myth of sebastianism, as there is a clear identification between the life of the Polish king and that of D. Sebastião, because both try to fight the Mohammedans, but end up missing in the decisive battle, the Polish king in Varna and the Portuguese king in Alcácer Quibir.

The circumstances of this historical novel, the 1939 alluvium and the myth of D. Sebastião, are also related to the exhibition of the Portuguese World in 1940 and the celebration of Portuguese double independence (1140 and 1640). Once again, João dos Reis Gomes appropriates a pantheistic figure from Madeira’s history and tradition to serve regionalist intentions and, at the same time, the homeland, which, in a difficult political period, in the middle of the Second World War, seeks to maintain the shaky neutrality in relation to the blocs of the belligerent powers. The sebastic figure of Henrique Alemão, in this context, invokes, in our view, the soul of national resistance and Portuguese courage in a difficult juncture.

Paulo César Vieira Figueira

References

Figueira, Paulo (2021). João dos Reis Gomes: contributo literário para a divulgação da História da Madeira [Phd thesis]. Funchal: Universidade da Madeira.

Figueira, Paulo (2019). O romance histórico na Madeira: o caso de A filha de Tristão das Damas, de João dos Reis Gomes. In Sérgio Guimarães de Sousa e Ana Ribeiro (orgs.). Romance histórico: cânone e periferias. Vila Nova de Famalicão: Húmus/Centro de Estudos Humanísticos da Universidade do Minho.

Marinho, Maria de Fátima (1999). O romance histórico em Portugal. Porto: Campo de Letras.

Rodrigues, Paulo (2012). O Anel do Imperador (1934), de João dos Reis Gomes, entre a História e a Ficção: Napoleão e a Madeira. In Maria Hermínia Amado Laurel (dir.). Carnets, Invasions & Évasions. La France et nous, nous et la France. Lisboa: APEF/FCT, 81-97.

Vieira, Alberto (2001). A Autonomia na História da Madeira – Questões e Equívocos. In Autonomia e História das Ilhas – Seminário Internacional. Funchal: CEHA/SRTC, 143-175.

Vieira, Alberto (2018). Arquipélagos e ilhas entre memória, desmemória e identidade. Funchal: Cadernos de Divulgação do CEHA.

[1] Alberto Vieira conceived the idea of building a pantheon of regional heroes in the sense of differentiating between regional and national history: “desenvolvem-se os estudos locais e regionais. A História local e regional ganha evidência e diferencia-se da nacional. Constrói-se o panteão de heróis regionais” (Vieira, 2018: 20).

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Orlanda Amarílis

Posted on 24 de Novembro, 2022 | By caparicio

Orlanda Amarílis Lopes Rodrigues Fernandes Ferreira was a Cape Verdean writer, born on the island of Santiago, on October 8, 1924. In Mindelo (island of São Vicente), she completed primary and secondary school, before moving to the Portuguese State of Goa, where he finished his studies for the Primary Teaching. In Lisbon, he graduated in Pedagogical Sciences at the Universidade de Lisboa. He died in the portuguese capital on February 1, 2014.

Literature and Linguistics were always a presence in her life, through her husband, the writer Manuel Ferreira (Leiria, 7-18-1917/Linda-a-Velha, 3-17-1992), a scholar of Lusophone African literature and cultures, author of No Reino de Caliban and A Aventura Crioula, through her father, Armando Napoleão Rodrigues Fernandes (Brava, 7-1-1889/Praia, 6-19-1969), who published the first Creole-Portuguese dictionary, O Dialecto Crioulo: Léxico do Dialecto Crioulo do Arquipélago de Cabo Verde, and through Baltazar Lopes da Silva (São Nicolau, 4-23-1907/Lisbon, 5-28-1989), author of Chiquinho and founder of the magazine Claridade.

Orlanda Amarílis, as a member of the Academia Cultivar, founded by students from the Liceu Gil Eanes, and a contributor to the magazine Certeza (1944), belonged to the Geração de Certeza, whose main aim is to discuss the isolation of the Cape Verde archipelago and the islands from each other, with the purpose of edifying Cape Verdean culture and identity: “os escritores da Geração de Certeza propõem fincar os pés na terra e assumem um compromisso com a ação e a mudança, a partir, sobretudo, de textos literários que privilegiem a reconstrução da identidade cabo-verdiana e o combate à opressão” (Deus, 2020: 75-76).

In relation to the Geração de Certeza and supposed problem with the claridosos, Orlanda Amarílis speaks of a work of continuity:

quando apareceu a Certeza, não foi para combater a Claridade como ouvi algures. Até já ouvi que Certeza não foi marco nenhum. No entanto, para nós [os membros da Academia Cultivar], Certeza viria trazer algo de novo. Havia um pulsar diferente dentro de nós, de uma geração posterior, portanto mais recente que os fundadores da Claridade. Fundar Certeza foi dar continuidade ao que a Claridade tinha iniciado. (Laban, 1992: 271-272)

Over time, Amarílis became one of the most important female faces in Cape Verdean literature, expressing, in her work, Cape Verdean women and the diaspora. Their stories reveal an important contribution to the registration and dissemination of Cape Verde’s intangible heritage.

Upon her return, after a long exile, she recalls her lost insularity, looking in that time of physical distance for the strength that made her write and publicize the life of the islands, even in the “tontice ingénua” (naive foolishness) of being able to relive that time:

eu fui colocada na posição de procura de um universo perdido e, se essa rotura existiu virtualmente, foi bom, porque me obrigou a escrever. No entanto, o meu clima emocional de então não tem razão de ser neste momento. É uma tontice ingénua pensarmos ser possível, ao fim de tantos anos de ausência, reviver as emoções de então. […]. Quando há alguns anos voltei a Cabo Verde, perante mim espalharam-se as cinzas do vulcão que foi a minha vida até aos dezasseis anos. (Laban, 1992: 263)

As the most outstanding work we consider Cais do Sodré té Salamansa (1974; 1991), whose title is a reference to Lisbon and the island of São Vicente, more precisely to the village located northeast of Mindelo. The set of seven short stories makes known the marks that we point out in Orlanda Amarílis’s stories, with relevance to the diaspora, the woman and the Cape Verdean feeling of abandonment and return to the islands, in a journey that started in “Cais do Sodré” and ended in “Salamansa”.

With characters that embody the islands, for their identity, for their language (expressions, forms of treatment, songs, everyday habits), for the difficulty and hardship of life, and for the subtlety dichotomous, physical and figurative, between the character that leaves the space of the archipelago and the one that remains, “estando em exílio, contrapõem a todo tempo a memória de sua identidade cabo-verdiana às modificações causadas pela distância espacial e temporal, e essa distância vai se inserindo nas suas filiações identitárias” (Silva, 2010: 63), Orlanda Amarílis offers a reflection on “questões importantes do cenário sociocultural cabo-verdiano como, por exemplo, a ressignificação da identidade cultural, a violência de gênero, a opressão sofrida pelas mulheres, a solidão, a emigração” (Deus, 2020: 80).

From Cais do Sodré to Salamansa, we highlight what we can consider a synthesis of the writing of Orlanda Amarílis. In the final part of the short story “Salamansa”, Antoninha “garganteia com sabura” (Amarílis, 1991: 82) a song in Creole, which is a motto to invoke the beach of Salamansa, communion with the sea and the emigrant Linda, a girl from “rua do Cavoquinho” (Amarílis, 1991: 80), who symbolizes the difficulties of the life of the women of the islands: “Oh, Salamansa, praia de ondas soltas e barulhentas como meninas intentadas em dia de S. João. Oh, Salamansa, de peixe frito nos pratos cobertos no fundo dos balaios e canecas de milho ilhado por titia em caldeiras com areia quente. Areia de Salamansa, Linda a rolar na areia” (Amarílis, 1991: 82).

Of the author’s works, we have to mention, in addition to Cais do Sodré té Salamansa, Ilhéu dos pássaros (1982), A casa dos Mastros (1989), Facécias e Peripécias (1990), A tartaruguinha (1997).

Paulo César Vieira Figueira

References

Amarílis, Orlanda (1991). Cais do Sodré té Salamansa. Linda-a-Velha: ALAC.

Deus, Lílian Paula Serra e (2020). Orlanda Amarílis, Vera Duarte e Dina Salústio: a tessitura da escrita de autoria feminina na ficção cabo-verdiana. In Regina Dalcastagnè (Dir.). Veredas – Revista da Associação Internacional de Lusitanistas, nº 33. Coimbra: Associação Internacional de Lusitanistas. 74-87.

Figueira, Paulo (2014).Estudo Lexical sobre Cais do Sodré Té Salamansa, de Orlanda Amarílis. In Marcelino de Castro (Dir.). Islenha, nº 55. Funchal: DRAC. 63-74.

Laban, Michel (1992). Cabo Verde: encontro com escritores. Vol. I. Porto: Fundação Engenheiro António de Almeida.

Laranjeira, Pires (1987). Formação e desenvolvimento das literaturas africanas de língua portuguesa. In Literaturas africanas de língua portuguesa. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 15-24.

Mariano, Gabriel (1991). Cultura caboverdeana – ensaios. Lisboa: Vega.

Silva, Elisa Maria Taborda da (2010). Cais do Sodré té Salamansa: o cabo-verdiano em exílio. In Beatriz Junqueira Guimarães (Ed.). Cadernos CESPUC de Pesquisa, nº 19. Belo Horizonte: Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais. 61-70.

Trigo, Salvato (1987). Literatura colonial/Literaturas africanas. In Literaturas africanas de língua portuguesa. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 139-158.

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Art Islands

Posted on 24 de Novembro, 2022 | By caparicio

An Art Island refers to an island characterized by prominent artistic or creative elements such as contemporary art museums, artist studios, site-specific art events, communities of artists, and art festivals that are often created by famous artists, architects, and creators (Qu 2020; Prince, Qu, and Zollet 2021). Representative cases include peripheral islands Naoshima, Teshima, and Inujima in the Seto Inland Sea of Japan; Fogo Island Arts’ Bridge Studio on a remote island of Newfoundland, Canada, and the craft-art island of Bornholm, Sweden. Unlike the original island art, ‘art island’ implies a reterritorialization/creative place-making process (intervening in, interacting with, as well as influencing the co-creation between art and communities) shaped by art development in a context of social transformation. An important feature is social transformation: art islands frequently deploy socially engaged artwork and events. (Qu 2020; Crawshaw 2018; Favell 2016; Mccormick 2022).

Art intervenes on the island

Art Islands involve interrelated processes that co-create a new art island identity between art and destination. Socially engaged art brings site-specific and community based public artworks, art projects, or events into a community (Qu 2019; Mccormick 2022). It imports typically non-local artistic and cultural elements that impact the local community’s original landscape, lifestyle, art, and culture (ibid). The social practice transition of contemporary art consists of stepping out of art museums and the traditional art world into the urban and rural social context as relational art sites (Qu 2020). Relational art sites are “assemblages, they are hybrid spaces where the line between what is essentially rural and urban, as well as local and global, is blurred through their intensive interactions with extra-local people, ideas, materials, capital, investments, discourses, and processes” (Prince, Qu, and Zollet 2021, 250). The transition from original island community to art island is marked by concurrently changing processes of intervention, resistance, adaptation, and co-creation at the local level (ibid). Artists and arts organizers often contemplate the utopic ideals implied in “art islands” (Favell 2016). In short, the community level outcomes of art-island intervention are not limited to art but connect to rural/urban planning, art tourism, creative place-making, rural development and revitalization (Qu 2020; Prince, Qu, and Zollet 2021).

Art interacts with the island

Within communities, art is usually described as having the potential to “read” local issues rather than solve them. (Crawshaw and Gkartzios 2016). Art is limited in its capacity to remedy social issues (Qu 2020; 2019). Merely creating art museums and artworks or otherwise making an island more “artistic” does not necessarily make an art island. The overlapping relationships between art and tourism are becoming inseparable on art islands (Franklin 2018). Often, art islands mix art development with tourism development (Qu 2019; 2020), accompanied by creative entrepreneurship (Prince, Qu, and Zollet 2021; McCormick and Qu 2021).

Art can be also considered as “an ingredient of landscape planning” (Crawshaw 2018, 10). During the art tourism reterritorialization process, observing whether the development enhances community prosperity or rather brings a commercialized destruction to the community is essential to evaluate whether art is only ‘on’ or also ‘for’ an island (Qu 2020).

Art island co-creation

Aside from the external development of art or art tourism, the endogenous efforts within communities play an important role in creating art islands. Creative residents with businesses have the power to co-create the art island community through their resourceful behaviors by enhancing social, tourism, and art development (Mccormick and Qu 2021; Qu, McCormick, and Funck 2020). Newcomers also play an important role; urban-to-rural migrants, for example, “are more likely to establish fancy cafés and guesthouses, often incorporating elements of contemporary design in their operations to adhere to the ‘art island’ character.” (Prince, Qu, and Zollet 2021, 248). A healthy neo-endogenous synergy between art and island provides a relational understanding of this co-creation mechanism. Critically, given that each island possesses its own unique social structure and cultural context, no two art islands are alike. Each has its own set of interrelationships and its own brand of creativity. Art islands are complex, trans-local assemblages of contemporary art and tourism, shaped by complex art-community co-create and exchange.

Meng Qu

Bibliography (Chicago Manual of Style)

Crawshaw, Julie. 2018. “Island Making: Planning Artistic Collaboration.” Landscape Research 43 (2): 211–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2017.1291922.

Crawshaw, Julie, and Menelaos Gkartzios. 2016. “Getting to Know the Island: Artistic Experiments in Rural Community Development.” Journal of Rural Studies 43: 134–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2015.12.007.

Favell, Adrian. 2016. “Islands for Life: Artistic Responses to Remote Social Polarization and Population Decline in Japan.” In Sustainability in Contemporary Rural Japan: Challenges and Opportunities, edited by Stephanie Assmann, 109–24. London and New York: Routledge.

Franklin, Adrian. 2018. “Art Tourism: A New Field for Tourist Studies.” Tourist Studies 18 (4): 399–416. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797618815025.

McCormick, A. D. (2022). Augmenting Small-Island Heritage through Site-Specific Art: A View from Naoshima. Okinawan Journal of Island Studies 3 (1).

Mccormick, A D, and Meng Qu. 2021. “Community Resourcefulness Under Pandemic Pressure: A Japanese Island’s Creative Network.” Geographical Sciences (Chiri-Kagaku) 76 (2): 74–86.

Prince, Solène, Meng Qu, and Simona Zollet. 2021. “The Making of Art Islands: A Comparative Analysis of Translocal Assemblages of Contemporary Art and Tourism.” Island Studies Journal 16 (1): 235–54. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.175.

Qu, Meng. 2019. “Art Interventions on Japanese Islands: The Promise and Pitfalls of Artistic Interpretations of Community.” The International Journal of Social, Political and Community Agendas in the Arts 14 (3): 19–38. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.18848/2326-9960/CGP/v14i03/19-38.

———. 2020. “Teshima – from Island Art to the Art Island.” Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures 14 (2): 250–65. https://doi.org/10.21463/shima.14.2.16.

Qu, Meng, A. D. McCormick, and Carolin Funck. 2020. “Community Resourcefulness and Partnerships in Rural Tourism.” Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2020.1849233.

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Cenáculo

Posted on 24 de Novembro, 2022 | By caparicio

Cenáculo was a group of gatherings that met at the Golden Gate[1], founded by João dos Reis Gomes, Fr. Fernando Augusto da Silva and Alberto Artur Sarmento, which became relevant for the ideas presented, although, so far, no minutes or official documents of the gathering that allow us to objectively evaluate the intellectual debate. As for the constituent members, and aware of the lack of space for the acceptance of new elements, Joana Góis reports on 24 members (Góis, 2015: 24-25), among them the son of João dos Reis Gomes, Álvaro Reis Gomes.

Visconde do Porto da Cruz expresses that the group is not open to new generations: “Em volta do ‘Cenáculo’ apareciam curiosos que não se afoitavam a aproximar-se de centro tão restrito, onde, especialmente, Reis Gomes e o Padre Fernando da Silva, não viam com bons olhos o advento de novos valores” (Porto da Cruz, 1953: 12).

Joana Góis shares Visconde’s opinion and adds that the gathering was a mystery in terms of collective action, but expressed itself very well through the role of its individualities: “A ‘misteriosa’ geração reunia-se em silêncio e permaneceu, acima de tudo, na esfera privada e sem expressão pública dos seus trabalhos” (Góis, 2015: 21).

Cenáculo elements gravitate towards the edition of two periodicals directed by Major João dos Reis Gomes, Heraldo da Madeira and Diário da Madeira, respectively, whose orientations approach subjects related to autonomy, regionalism and history, literature, traditions and politics related to Madeira, all under the inspiration of a certain conservatism and patriotism, but with the focus on the construction and defense of a Madeiran identity.

We believe that the most outstanding action of Cenáculo, as a collective, is the formation of Mesa do Centenário, with the objective of carrying out the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of Madeira. Always with the intention of a nationwide celebration, the action of the members of Mesa do Centenário led to the challenge of modernizing Funchal, in order to dignify the event’s stage.

Between Cenáculo and Mesa do Centenário there seems to have been a natural transition and, based on the positions conceived and publicized in the Diário da Madeira, the commemorative program of the Madeira Centenary was designed. The “Geração do Cenáculo” managed to add a cultural foundation to the event, which triggered an atmosphere of conflict with metropolis, which meant that, between December 1922 and January 1923, Lisbon was not represented, despite the several international commissions.

The fact turned out to be fruitless due to the lack of argumentative sustainability in relation to the Madeiran identity because, according to Nelson Veríssimo, “Faltaram intelectuais que exaltassem esses princípios que congregaram vontades e animaram a condução de populações por entusiásticos guias” (Veríssimo, 1985: 232). After the festivities, the “cenaculistas” were also participatory voices in the Comissão de Estudo para as Bases da Autonomia da Madeira.

Cenáculo’s line of thought approaches, from what we can assess from its members, through the newspapers and the action of Mesa do Centenario, a Madeiran identity close to patriotic values (Portuguese settlement, exaltation of the Portuguese element) and not so much cosmopolitanism also present in the Madeiran feeling[2].

The meetings and ideas of the “ninho da águia” (Eagle’s Nest) are the target of critics who were fascinated by the group: “[Reis Gomes] Vindo do labirinto da vista da cidade, depois de haver feito a sua longa jornada profissional diária – […] – encontrava no íntimo cavaco com amigos, reunidos numa das salas do hotel Golden Gate, o benéfico oásis para o seu descanso físico e intelectual” (Vieira, 1950: 18). In relation to literature, João dos Reis Gomes and the “Geração do Cenáculo” became forerunners of intellectuals who, in the 1940s, saw “na narrativa de ficção com forte cunho regionalista” the possibility “de constituir uma história, uma memória, uma biblioteca, uma identidade cultural forte para as gerações futuras da Ilha” (Santos, 2008: 569).

Paulo César Vieira Figueira

References

Góis, Joana Catarina Silva (2015). A Geração do Cenáculo e as Tertúlias Intelectuais Madeirenses (da I República aos anos 1940) [Masters dissertation]. Porto: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto.

Gouveia, Horácio Bento de (1952). Reis Gomes – Homem de Letras. In Das Artes e Da História da Madeira, nº 13. Funchal, 29-31.

Gouveia, Horácio Bento de (1969). O académico e escritor João dos Reis Gomes. In Panorama, nº 29. Lisboa, 6-9.

Figueira, Paulo (2021). João dos Reis Gomes: contributo literário para a divulgação da História da Madeira [Phd thesis]. Funchal: Universidade da Madeira.

Pestana, César (1952). Academias e tertúlias literárias da Madeira – “O Cenáculo”. In Das Artes e da História da Madeira, vol. II, nº 38. Funchal, 21-23.

Porto da Cruz, Visconde (1953). Notas & Comentários Para a História Literária da Madeira, 3º Período: 1910-1952, vol. III. Funchal: Câmara Municipal do Funchal.

Salgueiro, Ana (2011). Os imaginários culturais na construção identitária madeirense (implicações cultura/economia/relações de poder). In Anuário do Centro Estudos e História do Atlântico, nº 3. Funchal: CEHA, 184-204.

Santos, Thierry Proença dos (2008). Gerações, antologias e outras afinidades literárias: a construção de uma identidade cultural na Madeira. In Dedalus, nº 11-12. Lisboa: APLC/Cosmos, 559-582.

Veríssimo, Nelson (1985). Em 1917 a Madeira reclama Autonomia. In António Loja (dir.). Atlântico, nº 3. Funchal: Eurolitho, 230-233.

Vieira, G. Brazão (1950). Um grande vulto que a morte levou: João dos Reis Gomes. In Das Artes e da História da Madeira, nº 2. Funchal, 17-19.

[1] The Golden Gate, known as one of the “esquinas do mundo”, in the words of Ferreira de Castro, and due to its geographical location, close to the Cathedral of Funchal, the port, the Palácio de São Lourenço and the Statue of Zarco, is a famous restaurant space that favors the passage of citizens from all over the world, mainly through its esplanade, something that is still verifiable today.

[2] Cf. Ana Salgueiro, “Os imaginários culturais na construção identitária madeirense (implicações cultura/economia/relações de poder)”, 184-204.

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ISSN 2975-9331

Categoria: Representations