Utopian Eyes and Dystopian Writings in Angolan Literature

Colonial and Postcolonial Utopia: Idealization and Meaningful Projections

Postcolonial theory is proving to be a productive line of thought for the African Literatures and Cultures in former Portuguese colonies. On the one hand, postcolonial theory allows for the search for differentiated answers within political realities that have evolved in autonomous directions as far as the production of discourses that address the acolonial and postindependence realities. Moreover, a postcolonial approach helps to reveal updated hermeneutical references for the various artistic fields in these countries. If we take into account that the political independence of the five colonies took place as recently as 1975, it allows us to understand that it is a reality that cannot be read through the eyes of a postmodern society testing the limits of a fragmentary culture as such. What these countries have been looking for—as we will try to show in this essay—are the many possible ways of building or maybe restoring in the present an ethics based on the multiple dimensions of ancestral and precolonial narratives. Whether and how this has been or is being achieved is a question that still cannot be fully answered, but we would like to add our contribution to such a debate.

To begin testing this hypothesis we must look back to the 1960s when postcolonial could be read as anticolonialism. By then, the different utopian perspectives were marked by representations that addressed the colonial system from the inside and the outside of its dominant strategies. The reason for choosing this decade can be easily explained: it was during the '60s that the anticolonial wars started, and it was also during this period that the guerrilla became an organized structure based on international support, especially from already independent African countries.

Portuguese politicians at the time seemed to be looking at Africa finally as a cause that could not be taken for granted. This accentuated a utopian project based on intensive economic development and on the encouragement of emigration. The occupational strategy, both on the military and social fields, was a reaction that supposed a project adjusted to principles of modernity and was at the same time a mirror-based strategy. By this is meant that Portugal was seeking to build its identity through the renewal of an image that was grounded in new territories and through the appropriation of different dimensions of alterity. Dominating other peoples also meant appropriating cultural and symbolic systems that could justify the new portrait of a country not at ease within its national borders and international partnerships. Isolated on international grounds, Portugal needed to reinforce its role in Africa in order to achieve a singular position. A good part of this dimension tended to be built as one of a spiritual nature, based on the idea of a distinctive Portuguese society, defined as multicultural, within a dynamics of "gentle occupation" since inspired by the mystical idealization of free contact and racial mingling. The well-known and controversial "lusotropicalist" conceit clearly illustrates clearly this assumption. "Lusotropicalism" is an ideology, initiated by Brazilian intellectuals, based on the belief in a very accepting and nonprejudicial contact fostered by the Portuguese who were responsible for a racially hybrid and multicultural Brazil.

Homogeneity being the basic feature of this approach sounds contradictory with the image of diversity that it proposed and is one of the problems such a perspective hardly explains. If we see the Other as a reflexive and dependent image of the Self, and the latter as an image only fully accomplished through the transformed Other, as Portuguese culture did as far as its colonies are concerned, we can realize that Lusitanian identity was one of a split nature. The need to recall the structuring signs of this ideology was thus one of the major supports of the imperialist construct.

Building the Self upon the "Other as I see it," locating the Self on alterity grounds, became a vocational strategy inspired by a spiritual motivation for improvement, relying at the same time on a rational system of values. This system could be one of the main characteristics of...