Lusophone Africa is a remarkable book exploring music, film, and literature in Portuguese speaking Africa since independence. Fernando Arenas characterizes his book's vision as ‘kaleidoscopic’ (p. xv), a useful signal of the colorful yet at times incompletely resolved analysis that follows. Like a kaleidoscope's opposing mirrors that reflect a fragmented image, the ambitious and far-reaching discussion in Lusophone Africa will challenge readers to grasp the ensemble of the book's vision.
Arenas begins with an introduction that considers the place of Lusophone Africa within the literature on postcolonialism and globalization followed by an opening chapter that sketches the historical matrix connecting African, Portuguese, and Brazilian cultural fields. Though the subsequent chapters share a measure of thematic and conceptual overlap, they can be read independently of one another. So, too, can they be read independently of the introduction, whose lucid discussion of postcolonialism and globalization does not contribute significantly to the interior chapters. The three chapters that follow examine the relation of Cape Verdean music to a globalized industry and market, the engagement of Luso-African film makers with the promise of independence and the disappointments of postcolonial politics, and the literary recasting of the four decades since Angola's independence struggle. Arenas' encyclopaedic knowledge of Cape Verdean musical topography and of Angolan literary traffic enables him to detail the aesthetic wellsprings that feed such work and the linkages among them.
Only a scholar as knowledgeable of these cross-cutting linkages and as linguistically agile, could offer so richly textured an analysis of Cape Verdean music, skillfully tracing its African and Portuguese roots onto the historical cartography of the Atlantic world. Combining elements of biography, ethnomusicology, and geography, Arenas explains how and why Cesária Évora became a global sensation at the end of the 1980s. His fine-grained description of Cape Verdean musical styles – morna, koladera, funana, and batuku – makes clear the historical origins of their hybrid character, and his sensitive, almost exegetical, reading of Évora's lyrics evokes the individual and collective histories of movement, loss, and longing that so strongly mark the music she and other Cape Verdean artists have produced. The analysis neatly reflects the centrality of migration to a ‘diasporized nation’ and convincingly demonstrates how Évora's music – produced at home and abroad – has been a ‘vehicle for imagining the nation’ that nurtures ‘powerful symbolic and affective bonds’ (p. 46).
The chapter on film lacks a similar analytical coherence; Arenas describes it as a ‘critical inventory’ (p. 156), and its sequential movement from one film to another has a catalogue-like quality. Among the themes discussed, that of postcolonial promise and disappointment emerges most clearly. The national liberation movements that fought the Portuguese in the 1960s and 1970s saw cinema as an instrument for nation-building and, in the early postcolonial era, film makers and politicians believed the medium could both confirm the legacy of the revolution and build a brighter socialist future. Even as those beliefs withered in the 1980s, replaced with neo-liberal reform policies and a version of competitive electoral democracy, Arenas points to film makers' reluctance to participate in the collective exercise of forgetting common to many postsocialist nations. Instead, directors such as Flora Gomes, from Guinea-Bissau, returned to examine the independence-era moment with a skeptical lens, bringing into sharp focus the ‘contradictions and injustices that arose at the time of independence’ (p. 120). Likewise, Arenas describes how Licínio Azevedo, from Mozambique, ‘has remained faithful to the ethical imperative of … granting historical agency to the rural poor’ (p. 148), even if the Frelimo-led government that once championed such agency as a ‘sophisticated weapon’ against capitalism now focuses on other priorities.
Arenas similarly underscores Angolan writers' concern for social justice in a postcolonial moral landscape seemingly bereft of such matters, at least in the public political sphere, dominated by an ethic of narrow self-interest nourished by mineral wealth. Work by Pepetela and Manuel Rui reflects a ‘profound disillusionment’ with their country's political evolution, especially the ‘injustices, contradictions, unfulfilled promises, and failures' (p. 164) of the national government. Arenas dwells on how these works represent affect in their characters' lives, exploring their conflicted attachments to one another and to their common history. The narrative weight placed on affect is a not-so-subtle rebuke to Angola's leaders, who demonstrate almost no such attachment, either to the mass of their countrymen, or to their hastily discarded historical materialism.
Lusophone Africa covers a great range, yet the whole seems not quite equal to the sum of the parts. Arenas chose the language of globalization and postcolonialism as the lexical framework for his analysis, perhaps understandably, since a study of such broad scope requires a similarly wide field of vision. Yet if the language of globalization works well for analyzing Cesária Évora as a ‘world music phenomenon’ (p. 45), it is less illuminating when looking at Luso-African film and Angolan literature, which seem decidedly postcolonial, rather than global, in character. The title reflects this imperfect balance, signaling ambition to encompass all of Lusophone Africa, whose path beyond independence is not so neatly captured.
