Radical Otherness in As Duas Sombras do Rio, by João Paulo Borges Coelho

In “Time to listen to the ‘other’ while the ‘other’ exists, before the other is all that is left” (Carvalho, O direito à exigência. Buala: cultura africana contemporânea, 2011), Ruy Duarte de Carvalho identifies the plurality of positions that African citizens can currently experience in different parts of the world: (1) the other, in italics, is the group of individuals of ex-colonized parents or originating from ex-colonies, who, today, integrate in full statutory law the national populations of the former mother countries, although they are as different from the ruling mass; (2) the “other,” in single inverted commas, is the ex-colonized with which the West deals in the contexts of ex-colonies; (3) the “other,” in quotation marks, is the subject marked by traits affecting populations, who, although included as nationals in nation-states of colonial formation, maintain uses, practices and behaviors more closely related to pre-colonial than post-colonial frameworks and who, for this very reason, are today the main target of exclusion. Highlighting the multiplicity of identifications and “politics of enmity” (Mbembe, Politiques de l'inimitié, Paris, 2016) under way, we have recently observed that Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume also rethink the different levels of otherness in Europe—which range from neighbour to radical and which develop respectively within macro-categories such as “autre” and “autrui” (Can and Chaves, Racism and Racial Surveillance. Modernity Matters, New York; London, 16–40, 2022). Focusing on the novel As duas sombras do rio [The Two Shadows of the River] (2003), by the Mozambican writer and historian João Paulo Borges Coelho, with the theoretical support of Ruy Duarte de Carvalho (O direito à exigência. Buala: cultura africana contemporânea, 2011), Baudrillard and Guillaume (Figures de l’altérité, Paris, 1994), and Mbembe (Politiques de l'inimitié, Paris, 2016), we will analyze the regimes of otherness of the character Leónidas Ntsato.