Navegando entre ilhas culturais e disciplinares. Uma epistemologia arquipelágica: João Manuel Varela e a instabilidade moderna

The work of João Manuel Varela (Cape Verde, 1937-2007), unstable and plural in its disciplinary and cultural affiliation, is constituted by literary and art criticism texts, signed both by the author himself and by three pseudo – heteronyms: João Vário, Timóteo Tio Tiofe and G. T. Didial. It also includes academic research (neurosciences and ethnomedicine), as well as collaboration in various scientific, cultural and educational projects. The cross-reading of all these fragments shows us a strong implication of these multiple legacies and a recurring epistemological reflection on cultural and disciplinary boundaries. Subverting the Enlightenment paradigm of strongly hierarchical segmentation of knowledge and cultures, Varela, mainly since the 1970s, developed a literary and cientific discourse which can be identified with the liquidity of late modernity described by Bauman. The Capeverdean author proposes an epistemological paradigm that can be metaphorically represented under the image of the archipelago. Structured on principles such as the porosity of borders, the critical autonomy and the implication between life / art / science / philosophy, this innovative paradigm (at the time) was tested in the architecture of his transgressive and tensional work. Thus, Varela challenges us to (re)look at the socalled peripheral cultural systems and to see how these cultural spaces have been implicated in the construction and questioning of modernity and its plural modernities