World(s) apart – Borges Coelho’s Museu da Revolução and Writing in (and of) a Changing World

Abstract

This article will depart from Said's position on the worldliness of texts and Pheng Cheah's reflections on postcolonial literature as world literature (2016) towards a reading of João Paulo Borges Coelho's 2021 novel Museu da Revolução. Borges Coelho's position on the articulation between history, politics, and literature (as literature; Rancière), as well as on the latter's aim of transforming the local place without losing sight of the universal, will provide insights into the ways in which the novel confronts the wordlessness of globalization. By staging a fictional democratization (Rancière), Museu da Revolução inscribes new ethico-political horizons as a "text that strives to generate the context", necessarily including those that have been forgotten from consensual (historical, political, memory) narratives. Lastly, the novel's positing of the transformative power of imagination will help flesh out the ways in which the "poetico-literary performativity" (Derrida) of texts can inscribe new ethico-political horizons and open up worlds (Cheah) when faced of the neoliberalist cancellation of the future (Berardi).