Book Launch | Fiction as History. Resistance and Complicities in Postcolonial Angolan Literature
The African Languages, Literatures and Cultures network
Book Launch | Fiction as History. Resistance and Complicities in Postcolonial Angolan Literature
Tuesday 17 January 2023, 2pm - 4pm
This event is free and all are welcome
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Od6VkU1FQew
Join us and the Portuguese sub-faculty's research seminar at Oxford for the book launch of Dr Dorothée Boulanger's first monograph Fiction as History. Resistance and Complicities in Postcolonial Angolan Literature (Legenda: 2022).
Dr Boulanger, co-creator of the @AfCulturesOx. TORCH network, will present her book in discussion with Professor Hilary Owen, research fellow in the Portuguese sub-faculty in Oxford, and Dr Alex Reza, lecturer in comparative literature at Bristol.
Fiction as History is an interdisciplinary analysis of over twenty Angolan novels written from the 1960s to the 2010s by some of the country’s most celebrated writers: Pepetela, Manuel dos Santos Lima, Manuel Pacavira, Manuel Rui, Boaventura Cardoso, José Eduardo Agualusa, Sousa Jamba and Ondjaki. Boulanger examines how fiction played a key role in shaping Angolan national identity and denouncing Portuguese colonial propaganda. In a country where many authors became state officials and members of the ruling party after independence, she uncovers also the interplay of literary resistance and complicities, and Angolan writers’ own political, social and male biases.
Rejecting Western academic separations of literature and history, power and poetics, this study centres African historiographies and modes of storytelling to focus on Angolan writers’ own retelling of their country’s distant and more recent past, from the Atlantic slave-trade and the creation of the Creole elite to the anticolonial armed struggle or the failed coup attempt of 27 May 1977.
Author:
Dr Dorothée Boulanger is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford, and a Junior Research Fellow of Jesus College.
The event is free and all are welcome!
Part of the African Languages, Literatures and Cultures Network events
