The post-colonial literature of Lusophone Africa

Author:Patrick Chabal

Summary:"This specially commissioned work is the first comprehensive and up-to-date volume in English on the Portuguese and Creole literatures of the five Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Sao Tome and Principe. It begins with an extensive introduction to the cultural and historical context within which the literature of these five countries was created. There follows detailed discussion - with many quotations, each one in the original and in translation - of the prose and poetry published by the writers from these countries since independence. As such the volume serves not only as a textbook but as a cultural and intellectual foundation for specialist and non-specialist readers alike interested in the Lusophone world and in African writing generally." "The work is innovative in three ways. It combines a literary and historical approach that helps to explain the very complex processes by which literature emerged in African societies notable for their intricate racial, ethnic, linguistic and cultural diversity. It also links African Lusophone literature to its three major cultural settings - the oral tradition of African or Creole literatures, the broader context of Portuguese-language literature in Portugal and Brazil, and the twentieth-century development of a distinct 'Black' and/or Negritude literature in North America, the Caribbean and Europe. Finally it discusses the ways in which Lusophone African literatures relate to the emergence of an original modern literature in the whole of post-colonial Africa."--Jacket