The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story (1866–2006): The Genealogy of a Genre by Peter J. Maurits

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story (1866–2006): The Genealogy of a Genre by Peter J. Maurits Thomas Waller Peter J. Maurits, The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story (1866–2006): The Genealogy of a Genre (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2022). 214 pages. Print and ebook. xiv + 214 pages. There is a long and high-quality tradition of English-language scholarship on Mozambican literature. The landmark publications of Hilary Owen's Mother Africa, Father Marx and Phillip Rothwell's A Postmodern Nationalist in the early 2000s set the benchmark for subsequent work in the field by analysing the subversion and redefinition of narratives of Mozambican nationhood, and the deconstruction of discourses of gender and sexuality, in the work of authors such as Noémia de Sousa, Lília Momplé, Paulina Chiziane, and Mia Couto. More recently, monographs by Eleanor Jones, Ana Margarida Martins, and Maria Tavares have carried forward this line of research with new work engaging the theory of biopolitics, the publishing dynamics of the global literary marketplace, and the legacy of the anti-colonial nationalist movement in Mozambique. While there are points of divergence and disagreement within this scholarship, two of its characteristic features are a preoccupation with the category of national identity and a theoretical affinity with postcolonial studies, a field in which the experiences of Portuguese-speaking African societies have historically been either under-represented or ignored. Each in their own [End Page 96] way, these scholars read Mozambican literature through the framework of the postcolonial nation-state, which the texts are then seen alternately to challenge, re-examine, contest, or deconstruct. Peter J. Maurits's new book The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story approaches Mozambican literature from a different perspective. Published in Peter Lang's book series 'Reconfiguring Identities in the Portuguese-speaking World', its orientation does not come from postcolonial theory, nor is it principally concerned with the themes of gender and sexuality, and while it has much to say about the trajectory of Mozambican nationhood, its scope transcends the bounding limits of the national framework to encompass a global horizon of political economy. The structure of the book is organized in five chapters of more or less equal length. The first chapter introduces key concepts and summarizes the monograph's thesis, that there exists a 'Mozambican modern ghost story'. The second chapter then presents the category of the modern ghost story through an analysis of the work of Walter Scott, with a particular focus on his 1827 short story 'The Highland Widow'. The third chapter identifies prototypes of the Mozambican modern ghost story in the work of the nineteenth-century poet Campos de Oliveira and in Orlando Mendes's important 1966 episodic novel Portagem. The fourth chapter theorizes the consolidation of the Mozambican modern ghost story proper in the period of the late 1980s, when Mozambique was transitioning from Marxism-Leninism to free-market capitalism. Finally, the fifth chapter argues, through a close reading of Mia Couto's novel O outro pé da sereia, that the Mozambican modern ghost story re-emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century to respond to the economic effects of neoliberal globalization. One of the virtues of Maurits's book is that it engages with two traditions that have received relatively short shrift in English-language work on Mozambican literature: Marxist social theory and world-literary studies. The first two sentences of The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story establish its argument at the outset at the intersection of these two fields: 'This book will argue that a Mozambican modern ghost story exists and that it registers primitive accumulation. It shows how literary form—a genre—can alter when it moves, temporally and spatially, through the world-literary system, and reacts with different forms and raw materials' (p. ix). A materialist commitment to the theory and critique of global capitalism is thereby paired with a sensitivity to the unevenness of the production and circulation of world-literary texts in a system stratified by power and inequality. Whereas the former preoccupation leads Maurits to theories of the aesthetic mediation of capitalist social form, and to the likes of Fredric Jameson and Pierre Macherey, the latter leads him to world...