Literature and Economy in Portuguese-speaking Southern Africa

Bibliographic Data

ID21729055
AuthorsThomas Waller (0000-0003-3994-3914, University of Nottingham, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume24
Issue1
Publication date2022-08-15
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCLCWeb Comparative Literature and Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1481-4374 • E-ISSN: 1481-4374
PublisherPurdue University (bepress) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.7771/1481-4374.4284
OpenAlexW4292319821
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited9

In “Literature and Economy in Portuguese-speaking Southern Africa”, Thomas Waller offers a comparative reading of literary responses to neoliberalization in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa. Reading the proliferation of spectral effects in the Mozambican literature of the late 1980s alongside dystopian depictions of societal collapse in contemporary Angolan fiction, he suggests that writers in the two states have used distinctive aesthetic idioms to register the reintegration of southern Africa into the neoliberal world-system. In the fiction of Mozambican writers Aldino Muianga and Aníbal Aleluia, he shows how the legacy of colonial underdevelopment and its role in the transition to neoliberalism in Mozambique is figured at the level of form through spectral and broadly gothic aesthetic strategies that intimate the rise in class tensions attendant on the establishment of a new national bourgeoisie. In Angola, similarly, he reads speculative novels by Pepetela and José Eduardo Agualusa as literary responses to the ecological fallout of the heightening of capitalist extractivism that has accompanied the transition from Afro-Marxism to free market capitalism in post-independence Angola. In this way, Waller shows the extent to which literary production in Mozambique and Angola has been used in an attempt to register and critique the trajectory of neoliberal politics in southern Africa and its systemic relation with the restructuring of political economic parameters across the globe

Bourgeoisie · Capitalism · Colonialism · Dystopia · Economics · Economy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Portuguese · Restructuring · Sociology · Underdevelopment · African history and culture studies · History · Law · Literature, Culture, and Criticism · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

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