Le relazioni degli esploratori portoghesi e il Mapa Cor-de-Rosa: proposta per una cartografia dell'immaginario africano fin-de siècle

This work shows how some reports drawn up by the late nineteenth century Portuguese explorers have contributed to the effort to carry out the project of the colonial Mapa cor-de-rosa (mapping simulation of sovereignty claims over the territories of Portugal located between Angola and Mozambique), thus disproving the myth of an explorer guided exclusively by scientific issues and knowledge desire. Through an historical and dialectical approach we tried to show how the scientific data are not the determining cause of these publications, to which literary critics have always shown little interest because of their alleged "scientific base", and defining them such as para-literature. The analysis of these texts, in comparison with the different literary genres from which the explorers derive from, a part from proving the continuation of some mental positivist coordinates which lead to a renewed commitment on the “other” and on the “elsewhere” seen as the Self-west convoluted logical-historical antecedents, reveal on the contrary the presence of a high rate of literariness that makes them, even for their perlocutionary value, similar to adventure novels rather than scientificacademic treaties. [edited by Author]