A parody of final redemption: The uses of geopolitical fiction in O Olho de Hertzog

Abstract

In his novel O Olho de Hertzog (2010), João Paulo Borges Coelho rewrites the past. Starting with Linda Hutcheon’s category of historiographic metafiction, this chapter will focus on the specific parody of the teleological construction of history, which notably contributes to the critical cosmopolitanism of this novel. A peculiar spacetime on the periphery of colonial empires lends an ex-centric perspective on Eurocentric historiography. Therefore, a comparison with Imperium (2012), a novel by the Swiss author Christian Kracht, sheds light on the uses of geopolitical fiction in partly overlapping periods since 1902 to the immediate aftermath of the First World War. O Olho de Hertzog goes clearly beyond repositioning Mozambican colonial identity in the beginning of the twentieth century, aiming towards a self-reflexive or even self-ironical positioning within twenty-first-century transnational world literature.