On the Margins of the Black Atlantic: Angola, the Eastern Bloc, and the Cold War

In this essay, I set in dialogue a documentary film, Abderrahmane Sissako’s Rostov-Luanda (1997), and a novel, Mongane Wally Serote’s Scatter the Ashes and Go (2002), to examine the role of the war in Angola in the cultural imaginary of African intellectuals. Angola was the site of one of the hot conflicts of the Cold War; yet it evokes not only tensions between the superpowers, but also political solidarities and cultural alliances that incorporate and go beyond the black Atlantic. These texts show that the Eastern Bloc is a constitutive part of the contemporary diasporic routes taken by black intellectuals. By taking into account diasporas routed through the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, these texts also expand and modify the conceptual tools and theoretical perspectives of black Atlantic and postcolonial studies.