Events Events: Simon Park (University of Oxford), “When Does the Empire Begin? Camões’s Os Lusíadas (1572)”

Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture/Tagus Press, Department of Portuguese and the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese American Archives present Simon Park (University of Oxford), “When Does the Empire Begin? Camões’s Os Lusíadas (1572)” Wednesday, October 9, 5:30 pm Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese American Archives (Library)

Abstract: It is perhaps surprising to ask the question “When does the empire begin?” of a text like Os Lusíadas that is about the historical arrival of Vasco da Gama from Lisbon in Calicut, India, at the end of the fifteenth century. Departing, counterintuitively, from the end of the poem, this lecture will look at how the poem imagines pre-arrival moments through the use of classical mythology and how these moments highlight the complicated entanglements of literature and empire. In these episodes of dreams, rumors, and sexualized fantasies, we see that Camões envisages the written and spoken word as not so much an accompaniment to empire as its enabling prerequisite. If national stories are told in a particular way, the poem suggests, they might make imperial dominion a foregone conclusion.

Professor Simon Park’s research focuses on the history, literature, and the visual arts of the Portuguese-speaking world in the Early Modern period. He is the author of Poets, Patronage, and Print in Sixteenth-Century Portugal: From Paper to Gold (Oxford University Press, 2021), which examines how poets thought of themselves in professional terms and used poetry to negotiate their social status and financial success in the 1500s, when poetry’s worth (and that of its practitioners) was regularly contested. Prof. Park’s current book projects include Wreckers, a rereading of disaster stories from the “Age of Discoveries” as a way of imaginatively “unlearning” imperialism, and a second project that explores the use of art and material culture to articulate and justify Portuguese dominion in Africa, Asia, and South America through the prism of the systematic failure of such undertakings.