Tribute to Gerald M. Moser

Gerald M. Moser, the US-based pioneering scholar and professor of lusophone African literatures, passed away, at the age of 90, on 2 March 2005. I am truly honored to have this opportunity to pay homage to a scholar who opened the way for so many of us who also teach and do research and write books and articles on the literatures of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé e Príncipe. In this regard, the social, cultural, and intellectual substance, along with the language, professional, and geographical itineraries of Professor Moser's life are unique and compelling.

Gerald Moser was born in Leipzig, Germany, on 3 January 1915. In 1935, he received his undergraduate degree, with a combined major in French, Latin, and German, from the University of Paris (the Sorbonne), where, in 1939, he was awarded a doctorate in Portuguese and comparative literature. Because of these language, cultural, and academic interests, in 1937, Moser made the first of what, over the ensuing decades, would come to be a total of sixteen trips to Portugal. Moser wrote his dissertation on Inês de Castro, a fourteenth-century tragic figure in Portuguese history who is depicted in Camões's famous epic poem Os Lusiadas. In 1939, with his PhD in hand, Moser emigrated to the United States. I might note that the rise of Nazism in their homeland led Gerald Moser and members of his family to emigrate.

Gerald Moser's first academic appointment in the US was, from 1939 until 1941, as an assistant professor of Spanish at Bridgewater College in Virginia. In 1941, he took postdoctoral courses on Spanish literature at the University of Chicago and, in 1945, at the University of Wisconsin. Although he audited Spanish literature courses at Wisconsin, he also became involved in the emerging Luso-Brazilian program at that university. As a matter of fact, during the 1944–1945 academic year, Moser was also among the first in the history of the University of Wisconsin to teach beginning Portuguese language courses. Prior to that, in 1943–1944, Moser had offered language courses at Cornell, and after leaving Wisconsin he taught for a year at the University of Illinois, Urbana. But it was at Pennsylvania State University, where he was a faculty member from 1949 until his retirement in 1978, that Gerald M. Moser established himself as one of North America's foremost professors and scholars of Portuguese, Brazilian, and lusophone African literatures. With regard to lusophone Africa, early in his career Moser emerged not only as the first US-based academic to teach and publish on the literatures of the five former Portuguese colonies in Africa, but also among the first scholars to do so anywhere in the world.

Along with his penchant for languages, with an especially increasing command of Portuguese, a reason for Moser's interest in lusophone African literature has much to do with his visits to Portugal in the 1950s and 1960s. It was during those decades that he made intellectual and cultural contact with emerging writers from the then colonies as well as with Portuguese intellectuals, writers, and literary critics of an anticolonialist bent. It should be noted at this juncture that in 1944, ironically at the height of António Salazar's dictatorial regime, the Casa dos Estudantes do Império (CEI—House of Students from the Empire) was founded in Lisbon, and a branch was opened in Coimbra. Secondary school and college-level students from throughout the "empire," including the Asian territories Goa, Macao, and East Timor, but overwhelmingly from the five colonies in Africa, gathered at the CEI for social, cultural, and, increasingly, clandestine political confabs and activities. A goodly number of these students and other Africans residing in the metropole of the then empire were emerging poets and writers of prose fiction. The CEI sponsored the publication of three anthologies, respectively of Angolan, Mozambican, and São Tomean poems. And from 1948 until 1952 and then from 1957 until 1961, issues of Mensagem (Message), the CEI's official bulletin, regularly featured poems and short stories, as well as essays...