Narrating the Postcolonial Nation: Mapping Angola and Mozambique

Abstract

Reviews 241 of Eça’s editorial work to the style, themes and format of Victorian journalism, known as the New Journalism of the 1880s and 1890s. Teresa Pinto Coelho’s archival work and knowledge of Eça’s editorial work are impressive and provide the basis for an elegant and careful interpretation of his periodical activity. Ana Mafalda Leite, Hilary Owen, Rita Chaves and Livia Apa (editors), Narrating the Postcolonial Nation: Mapping Angola and Mozambique (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014). vii + 291 pages. Print and e-book. Reviewed by Maria Tavares (Queen’s University Belfast) This collection provides a translation of a selection of essays from the Portuguese original, which was published by publishing house Colibri, in 2012. Clearly having the Anglophone reader in mind (e.g. quotations are supplied in English and Portuguese), the volume focuses on the relationship between Angolan and Mozambican literary works and the postcolonial nations that they engage with, both through close reading (approaching works individually or comparatively), and through a more theoretical discussion of the relationship between language and power that sets the tone of the entire collection. The choice of authors made by the contributors covers a wide temporal and literary range: Castro Soromenho, Leonel Cosme, Assis Junior, José Craveirinha, Pepetela, Luandino Vieira, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, Arnaldo Santos, Boaventura Cardoso, Manuel Rui, Paulina Chiziane, Mia Couto, José Eduardo Agualusa, Marcelo Panguana, Eduardo White, João Paulo Borges Coelho and Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa. Leite provides an excellent introduction. Despite not summarizing the individual articles, the co-editor explains the three sections in which the collectionissubdivided:‘HistoricalThemes’,whichconcentratesontherelevance of revisionism through testimonial, historical sources and fictionalization; the ‘Voyage Theme’, which puts forward the re-mapping of spaces of power, the reconfiguration of memory, and the challenging of notions of borders; and ‘Discursive Strategies’, whose focal point is the recovery of memory as a source of subjectivity by exploring different genres. The three points of intersection ultimately map on to the need to rethink theory, as proposed by Chambers and Falconi’s theoretical reflections. Preceding all three sections is Chambers’s reflection on postcolonial identities, through the lens of language, which proposes that the act of re-writing the past (with its imposed geographies, paradigms and forms of knowledge) makes viable the challenging of cartographies of power and associated historiographies, and the emergence of the multiple modernities that characterize the postcolonial. Falconi’s reflection, which appears at the end of Section 3, proposes to revisit and update the debate on the controversies surrounding the concept of Lusofonia, this time mapping it on to the literary production in the Portuguese language from African countries. Thirteen compelling articles appear in between the two reflections, all of Reviews 242 them proposing new insights into the linguistic and cultural appropriation that occurs in both literatures. The contribution by Matusse, which focuses on the narrative dimension of Craveirinha’s poetry and on its propensity to intersect narrative, social nature/evolution, and nation, provides an interesting addition, especially since part of the article presents an analysis that is mostly based on unpublished but highly relevant material, hereby adding a new dimension (that of the disillusionment towards the new leadership and society) to the work of Craveirinha. I would also highlight Owen’s reading of Khosa’s Ualalapi and Chiziane’s As Andorinhas, through the lens of Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject, in order to compare the critique of Ngungunhane’s legacy in both works as means to unveil, question and challenge an essentialist male national ideology. Can’s thought-provoking analysis of Borges Coelho’s work is also worth mentioning, since the scholar examines the author’s critique of the members of the elite that came into power in Mozambique after independence, focusing on the relationship between discourse and power. Finally, I must make reference to Apa’s article that by shifting the attention to the power of image proposes a reflection on African cinema and the challenges it faces. The scholar moves on to considering the particular case of ‘Lusophone’ African directors and films, and the important relationship between literature and cinema in Portuguese-speaking Africa. Overall, the collection is extremely useful to scholars interested in the...