Postcolonial Exceptionality and the Portuguese Language

José Eduardo Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons

Authors

  • Patricia Schor Utrecht University

Abstract

Language discourse attached to Portuguese national culture has been critical for the re-establishment of the imperial centre in the space of encounter between Portugal and its former colonies. The Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa has been problematising this centrality; both criticising and re-enacting the mythology of a benevolent colonial encounter à la Portuguese. This article analyses the representations of the Portuguese language in Agualusa’s novel The Book of Chameleons. It unravels the author’s negotiations with the postcolonial narrative of imperial exceptionality, concluding about the transgressive quality of Agualusa’s language imagination.

Author Biography

  • Patricia Schor, Utrecht University

    Patricia Schor is a researcher affiliated to the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University. In her PhD (Humanities) she critically examines postcolonial literature and theory in Portugal in its (dis)encounters with Africa. Schor published on postcolonial African literature in Portuguese, and co-edited the issue “Brazilian Postcolonialities” of the journal Portuguese Cultural Studies.

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Published

2026-05-04

Issue

Vol. 28 No. 2 (2015): The Postcolonial Cultural Industry

Section

Main Section

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Schor, P. (2026). Postcolonial Exceptionality and the Portuguese Language: José Eduardo Agualusa’s The Book of Chameleons. FRAME, Journal of Literary Studies, 28(2), 51-69. https://platform.openjournals.nl/FRAME/article/view/27383