PLCS 15/16 (2006)

Remembering Angola
Guest Editor - Phillip Rothwell (Rutgers University, New Brunswick)

Remembering Angola is a groundbreaking volume that brings together articles by leading scholars from around the world. From a range of disciplines, they reflect on the role Angolan culture has played in reformulating the torn fabric of a nation historically beset by strife and oppression. Thus, “re-membering” goes beyond recall, although many of the articles in the volume contemplate histories and memories — from those of the colonial war to those of post-independence exiles; from those of degredados to those of Angola’s leading literary voices; from those of Portuguese women who witnessed the horrors of Salazar’s policies in the jewel of the Portuguese imperial crown to those of a nineteenth-century journalist elite who laid the seeds of a national consciousness. The volume dialogues with a range of theoretical issues including the concept of voyaging through one’s own alterity as an Angolan antidote to Camões's appropriating voyage into the unknown; and an interrogation of Angola’s answers to Orientalism. It also includes a revealing interview (one of very few published in English) with the reclusive José Luandino Vieira, one of the Portuguese-speaking world’s literary titans, as well as original poetry by Angola’s leading female poet, Ana Paula Tavares.