Shameful things in the city: Writing and re-righting colonial urban space in José Luandino Vieira’s Luuanda

Abstract

As critical opinion has recognized, and his adopted name attests, Jose Luandino Vieira’s oeuvre is closely bound up with the capital city of Angola. I argue here that in the three estorias that comprise his collection Luuanda of 1963, Vieira engages with the different levels of the city as a colonial palimpsest, where the mass white emigration of the postwar period, the colonial discourse of the Salazar dictatorship and the uneven absorption of Luanda into transnational capitalism had been layered atop the native black and creole population, the experience of a peripheral colonialism and non-exploitative modes of socio-economic interaction. Yet in his counter-discursive depiction of Luanda in what were to prove the final years of Portuguese colonial rule, Vieira also shows how the culture and experience of the impoverished, mainly (though not exclusively) black shanties known as musseques (which surrounded the white ‘asphalt city’) were not just spaces of oppression and displacement but the source of possibilities for challenging Portuguese colonial control and the creation of an independent Angola with a non-hierarchized syncretic national culture.