In 1975, after much resistance, Portugal became the last colonial power to relinquish their colonies on the African continent. The tardiness of Portuguese decolonization in Africa (Cabo Verde, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, S o Tom and Pr ncipe) raises critical questions for the emergence of national literary and cultural production in the wake of national independence. Bringing together the works of poets, short story writers, and journalists, this book charts the emergence and evolution of the national literatures of Portugal's former African colonies, from 1975 to the present. The aim of this book is to examine the ways in which writers contended with the process of decolonization, forging national, transnational, and diasporic identities through literature while grappling with the legacies and continuities of racial power structures, colonial systems of representation, and the struggles for political sovereignty and social justice. This book will be the first of its kind in English to include canonical, emerging, and previously untranslated authors of poetry and short-form fiction to a new public.
Lusophone African Short Stories will bring to light and to broader audiences the important artistic engagement of writers from five African nations that are largely neglected outside the field of Lusophone Studies - Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and S o Tom e Pr ncipe. The literary production emanating from these locales offers perspectives and novel forms of engagement against the forces and legacies of Empire in the nearly five decades of postcolonial independence. The collection will make available to new readerships, scholars, and students, canonical and emerging literary thought and works that are borne out of the persistent struggle against imperialism and its racial, gender, sexual, and socioeconomic tenets. In this regard, the collection will feature an array of literary voices, genres, and aesthetics including novels, poetry, science fiction, Afro-Futurism, and postcolonial feminism. These recent artistic trends, we argue, are integral tools for individual and collective grappling with the political, societal, micro- and macro-economic, and cultural challenges of the postcolonial present. They have become modes of imagining communal subjectivity in new ways from the periphery of global capitalism and against forces of neocolonialism.
Industry Reviews
"Lusophone African Short Stories is an important reading for all of those who are interested in the Portuguese colonial Africa and the emergence and evolution of the national literatures of Portugal's former African colonies." -Sandra Sousa, Assistant Professor of Portuguese, University of Central
"Enhanced by a detailed introduction and biographical notes, this solid and inclusive anthology fills a mounting research and pedagogic need. The collected material ranges from the late colonial period to contemporaneity, comprising 25 writers from 5 Portuguese-speaking African countries. Notably, most selections are available here in English for the first time." - Luis Madureira, Professor, African Cultural Studies, University of Wisconsin
The present volume of Lusophone short stories and poetry in English translation is a welcome addition for diversity and inclusion studies generally, and for Lusophone literary studies specifically. Portuguese colonial societies were structured around white supremacy, patriarchal dominance, and coupled with a general contempt-if not outright dehumanization-of the indigenous peoples, their cultures, and their societies. In fact, the editors provide an interesting rebuttal to renowned Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre's theory of Lusotropicalism, which argued for a more humane racial relational system in the Portuguese colonies- Steven Eric Byrd, University of New England; Hispania Volume 105, Number 4, December 2022, pp. 615-616
