"In his will, Senhor da Silva Araujo has left a memoir that is a touching web of elaborate self-deceptions. He desired so ardently to prosper, to be taken seriously, and to join (perhaps, if they would have him) the exclusive Gremio country club. But most of all, he wanted to be a good man. And yet, shady deals, twists of fate, an illegitimate child: such is the lot of poor, self-critical Senhor da Silva Araujo. A bit like Calvino's Mr. Palomar in his attention to protocol and in his terror of life's passions; a bit like Svevo's Zeno (a little pompous, a little old-fashioned, and often hapless) Senhor da Silva Araujo moves along a deliciously blurry line between farce and tragedy: a self-important buffoon becomes a fully human, even tragic, figure in the arc of this novel."--BOOK JACKET.
The first novel by a female author to be published in Cape Verde, and the first to be translated into English, The Madwoman of Serrano is a magical tale of rural ideals and urban ambition, underpinned by an exploration of female empowerment. Serrano is an isolated village where a madwoman roams. But is she really mad or is she marginalised because she is wise and a woman? Could her babbling be prophecy? One day a girl falls from the sky and is found in the forest by Jeronimo. The villagers are suspicious of the newcomer, but Jeronimo falls in love with her. When she gives birth and disappears, Jeronimo takes care of the child, naming her Filipa. Years later, estranged from Jeronimo after being taken from the village in mysterious circumstances, Filipa is a successful businesswoman in the city. Her memories of growing up in Serrano and her friendship with the madwoman become increasingly vivid. When the madwoman's warnings come true and Serrano's sheltered existence is threatened by plans to build a dam, Jeronimo heads for the city himself. Will he and Filipa finally be reunited?
A startling, shape-shifting book of prose and images that draws on an unexpected pair of inspirations—the poetry of Fernando Pessoa and the history of air disasters—to investigate con men, identity politics, failures of leadership, the privilege of ineptitude, the slave trade, and the nature of consciousness. Early in 2017, on a plane from Cape Verde to Lisbon, author and visual artist James Hannaham started reading Pessoa & Co., Richard Zenith's English translation of Fernando Pessoa's selected poetry. This was two months after Trump's presidential election; like many people, ideas about unfitness for service and failures of leadership were on his mind. Imagine his consternation upon discovering the first line of the first poem in the book: "I've never kept sheep/But it's as if I did." The Portuguese, Hannaham had been musing, were responsible for jump-starting colonialism and the slave trade. Pessoa published one book in Portuguese in his lifetime, Mensagem, which consisted of paeans to European explorers. He also invented about seventy-five alter egos, each with a unique name and style, long before aliases and avatars became a feature of modern culture. Hannaham felt compelled to engage with Pessoa's work. Once in Lisbon, he began a practice of reading a poem from Zenith's anthology and responding in whatever mode seemed to click. Even before his trip, however, he had become fascinated by Air Disasters, a TV show that tells the story of different plane crashes in each of its episodes. These stories—as well as the textures and squares of the city he was visiting—began to resonate with his concerns and Pessoa’s, and make their way into the book. Through its inspirations and juxtapositions and its agile shifts of voice and form—from meme to fiction to aphorism to screenshot to lyric—the book leads us to reckon with the most universal questions. What is the self? What holds the self—multiple, fragmented, performative, increasingly algorithmically controlled, constantly under threat of death—intact and aloft?
Contains a collection of alphabetically-arranged entries from Ibadan to Mzilikazi on the history, geography, culture, religion and ideologies, wars, and economy of the African nations; and includes essays and photographs.
Africa is usually depicted in Western media as a continent plagued by continuous wars, civil conflicts, disease, and human rights violations; however, an analysis of the region’s cultural output reveals the depth and strength of the character of the African people that has endured the burden of colonialism. Undoubtedly, much of the scholarship on African literature focuses on countries colonized by the British such as South Africa and Nigeria; however, the African nations colonized by Spain and Portugal have also made major literary contributions. This volume examines the literature and cinema of the African nations colonized by Spain and Portugal (Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde, Angola, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe) to demonstrate the complexity and heterogeneity of these countries in their attempts to establish a post-colonial identity. This volume is intended for undergraduate students, graduate students, and researchers seeking to study Hispanic and Luso-African literature and film, and so better understand cultural production in previously underrepresented nations of Africa.
In 1975, after much resistance, Portugal became the last colonial power to relinquish its colonies on the African continent. The tardiness of Portuguese decolonization in Africa (Cabo Verde, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, São Tomé e Príncipe) raises critical questions for the emergence of national literary and cultural production in the wake of national independence. Bringing together the works of poets, short story writers, and journalists, this book charts the emergence and evolution of the national literatures of Portugal’s former African colonies, from 1975 to the present. The aim of this book is to examine the ways in which writers contended with the process of decolonization, forging national, transnational, and diasporic identities through literature while grappling with the legacies and continuities of racial power structures, colonial systems of representation, and the struggles for political sovereignty and social justice. This book will be the first of its kind in English to include canonical, emerging, and previously untranslated authors of poetry and short-form fiction to a new public.
In retracing explorer Mungo Park's fatal journey down West Africa's Niger River, author and adventuress Salak became the first person to travel alone from Mali's Old Segou to Timbuktu, the legendary "doorway to the end of the world." This is her story.
