Ilhas, ilhas, ilhas

Raul Brandão’s As ilhas desconhecidas has always been regarded as a great example of travel literature. This essay attempts a dialectical analysis of the text that highlights its social critique, which remains as urgent in the present. Brandão’s perspective, in all its subjectivity, lack of familiarity, anxiety, and even some feeling of repulsion, never becomes that of a consumer or collector of exotic, strange or alienating, images. While today’s tourists are tempted with the promise to have immediate access, without making any effort, to the “secrets” of nature and the intimate lives of the population, Raul Brandão never spared his readers the necessity to assume an ethical confrontation with a reality that forced itself upon them in all of its contrasts and contradictions to which no one could remain impassive. As Brandão shows us, the specter of the other is also always our own.