The Mozambican Modern Ghost Story (1866–2006)

Abstract

This is the first book to analyse the Mozambican modern ghost story, establishing the genre’s unique characteristics, situating it in a transnational context, and distinguishing it from other supernatural traditions. The study discusses why it emerged in different historical moments in Mozambican literature and how it was adapted in the process. Relying on a combination of short and close readings, this book offers a large scope spanning almost two centuries. It examines works of prominent and less prominent Mozambican authors – including Campos de Oliveira, Orlando Mendes, Mia Couto, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, and Paulina Chiziane – to discuss the relation of the Mozambican modern ghost story to colonial capitalism, the neoliberalism of the 1980s, and the globalization and world-literature debates of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries.