El otro como espejo. Aproximaciones al proceso de transculturación religiosa e identitaria en Saramago, Labarca y Costa

Abstract

Transculturation is a concept coined by Fernando Ortiz that has been applied preferably in Cuba and has been extended by Latin America for the analysis and study of the cultural products of a territory that has incessantly received the migration of different worldview peoples. We seek to extrapolate this theoretical concept coined in Latin America to other colonial contexts of the former Iberian empires. Hence, the objective of this article is to evaluate the relevance of the term transculturation as an epistemic category, to address the comparison of three novels of different origin, since this process - transculturation - allows and favors the emergence of new identities, both for colonized and for colonizers. The purpose of such a comparative task is to discuss the disfigured imaginary, inheritance of imperialism, which has underestimated the knowledge of subjected peoples. The corpus is composed by A viagem do elefante (2008) by José Saramago and O ultimo olhar de Manú Miranda (2000) by the Mozambican writer Orlando Da Costa, both written in Portuguese, along with the Chilean novel Butamalón (1994) by Eduardo Labarca. The comparative analysis of these fictional narratives focuses on the process of religious transculturation, which ranges from the considerable distance between representatives of the empire and colonized people, in Saramago's novel, to the fusion of cultures from which a new collective identity is born, in those of Da Costa and Labarca.