Africa and the Epic Imagination of Camões

Abstract

Abstract: This article advances arguments about the metaphoric presence of Africa primarily in the ideology of Os Lusíadas (the episode of Adamastor) and secondarily in the chronicles of Gomes Eanes de Zurara. It proposes that Adamastor is a figure of Renaissance melancholy (in both somatic and prophetic terms) and, as such, represents a melding of interior and exterior forms of consciousness or knowledge. Africa and the Moor function in Camões as an index of the “strange,” a principle of Camonian epic in which the foreign and the alien are repeatedly inscribed into expansionist thought and therefore are an integral component to it. Zurara's chronicles establish Africa as a primordial space of imperialism and its attendant historiographic discourse under the sign of Saturn, planet of time and melancholics.