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Transculturation
and Resistance in Lusophone African Narrative
by Phyllis Peres
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this Book now
In the first volume devoted to the work of contemporary Angolan
writers, Phyllis Peres analyzes the ways in which four writers--Luandino Vieira, Uanhenga
Xitu, Pepetela, and Manuel Rui--imagine their emerging nation as nationalist movements first
opposed the Portuguese colonial regime beginning in the early
1960s. Peres’s analysis follows these writers and their work
through independence, achieved in 1975, and the two ensuing
decades of civil war to the 1990s.
Applying a postcolonial theoretical perspective, Peres looks at
how these four writers, all of them active in the early
nationalist movements, first attempt to use distinctly Angolan
materials--language, folk stories, forms based on traditional
narrative techniques, and forms consistent with a revolutionary
ideology--in their work. She shows how these early optimistic
experiments gave way, in the face of civil war, to more ironic,
self-questioning works evoking an Angola too disparate to be
imagined, too polarized to have an identity. The literary project
of "narrating a nation" remains uncertain, but
Peres’s book draws from the particulars of the Angolan
experience to reach broader conclusions about patterns of
narrative resistance and transculturation applicable to the
literatures of other emerging nations and identities.
Given the growing interest in Lusophone African literature in the
United States and the increasing availability of such works in
translation, Peres’s book should prove particularly valuable
to students of Luso-Brazilian studies, colonial and postcolonial
African literatures, and comparative literature. Transculturation
and Resistance is also a wonderful critical companion to the
works (many of them currently available in translation) of
Angola’s most prominent writers.
Phyllis Peres is associate professor of Spanish
and Portuguese at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a
regular contributor to various scholarly journals on African,
Brazilian, and Portuguese literatures and colonial discourse.
1997. 168 pp. 6 X 9.
Notes,
bibliography, index.
ISBN 0-8130-1492-1
Cloth, $55.00
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"Peres's work . . . is outstanding as it attests to the author's penetrating insights and her superb analytical skills regarding the Angolan literary movement. Indeed, Peres succeeds in placing the four Angolan writers squarely in the context of the Angolan nationalist movement."--African Studies Quarterly
"The literary and sociopolitical interpretations adduced by Phyllis Peres are very sure-footed; this fact alone commends this study as much to students of Angolan politics as to those whose concern is for creative writing." --
African Affairs
"Represents
the first attempt to bring together and analyze under a cogent
theoretical framework the works of the four most prominent
Angolan fiction writers living today. . . . Highly
recommended."--Ana Paula Ferreira, University of California,
Irvine
"Original and provocative readings of [writers who are]
unquestionably the most important figures in current Angolan
narrative fiction."--Luís Madureira, University of
Wisconsin, Madison
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