Anticolonial poetics: forging solidarities and imagining futures

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper explores the construction of affective solidarities within and across the spaces and boundaries of colonized and racialized worlds in the works of militant poets of the Portuguese colonies in Africa. From the 1940s to the 1960s a distinct form of anticolonial poetry emerged written by a generation of Angolans and Mozambicans who became involved in the liberation struggles. The paper examines how poetry served as a vehicle to imagine and call into being various subjectivities and affective relations which actively countered the restrictions of colonialism and racism, especially on the part of the assimilados, the small educated elite constructed by Portuguese colonialism. Several important forms of anticolonial connectivity are expressed in these poems: connections with the broader African diaspora in North America, the Caribbean and Brazil; connections with all continental Africans; connections across the spaces of the Portuguese colonial empire – Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe; and connections of solidarity and unity between the assimilados and indígenas of the Portuguese colonies. These various dimensions of affective connection were constitutive of a new anticolonial imagination and looked towards liberated futures.