“Expanding the Present”: Utopianism and the Celebration of the Subaltern in Angolan Literature

Abstract

Through the study of Rioseco (1999), a little-known novel written by the Angolan author Manuel Rui, this article proposes to examine how, during some of the country's darkest hours, Angolan postcolonial literature remained an important site of creative resistance and utopia. Using Boaventura de Sousa Santos's works on the need to widen our understanding of social reality by taking into account the subaltern experiences and cosmologies traditionally discarded as irrelevant and anachronistic by Western rationality, this article examines how fiction literature in Angola participates in the decolonization of knowledge by forming an alternative archive, shedding light on subaltern populations in the country. Focusing more specifically on the subversion of gender stereotypes and the connection between material culture, community, and spirituality in postcolonial Angola, I highlight how the celebration of African cosmologies participates in the reimagining of modes of conviviality and reconciliation in a country plagued by violence and poverty.