This book argues that literary production in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa has developed distinctive aesthetic idioms that critically respond to crises of global capitalism and related failures of post-colonial governance. Drawing from recent research at the intersection of world-systems analysis and materialist theories of world literature, it identifies and evaluates two generic trends in the post-independence literatures of Mozambique and Angola. From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, there is a marked tendency in Mozambican literary production towards fictional representations of ghosts, spectral effects and gothic narrative techniques. In Angola, there is an analogous outburst of literary expression from the mid-1990s onwards, in which writers increasingly turn towards dystopian images of apocalypse, ecological crisis, and the disintegration of existing modes of social reproduction. Away from a restricted focus on the decline of the post-independence Marxist-Leninist state, the book contends that the upswing in these two genres of writing functions to critically register a world-systemic horizon that both surpasses and includes locally determined, national realities. The patterned repetition of spectral and dystopian forms in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa occurred at a time of heightened capitalisation, in which the region was subjected to newly expropriative forms of accumulation and ecological enclosure via integration into a reconstellated world-system headed by neoliberal finance capital. Through close readings of texts by authors such as Mia Couto, Suleiman Cassamo, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, Pepetela, and Ondjaki, this book asks: What factors drove literary production towards the figure of the spectre in Mozambique and towards dystopia in Angola? What emerging energies and social contradictions found shape in these generic idioms in ways that existing vocabularies were unable to express? What does the geo-temporal passage from spectrality to dystopia tell us about the history of capitalist development in southern Africa, and about the restructuring of political-economic parameters across the globe?

This book argues that literary production in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa has developed distinctive aesthetic idioms that critically respond to crises of global capitalism and related failures of post-colonial governance. Drawing from recent research at the intersection of world-systems analysis and materialist theories of world literature, it identifies and evaluates two generic trends in the post-independence literatures of Mozambique and Angola. From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, there is a marked tendency in Mozambican literary production towards fictional representations of ghosts, spectral effects and gothic narrative techniques. In Angola, there is an analogous outburst of literary expression from the mid-1990s onwards, in which writers increasingly turn towards dystopian images of apocalypse, ecological crisis, and the disintegration of existing modes of social reproduction. Away from a restricted focus on the decline of the post-independence Marxist-Leninist state, the book contends that the upswing in these two genres of writing functions to critically register a world-systemic horizon that both surpasses and includes locally determined, national realities. The patterned repetition of spectral and dystopian forms in Portuguese-speaking southern Africa occurred at a time of heightened capitalisation, in which the region was subjected to newly expropriative forms of accumulation and ecological enclosure via integration into a reconstellated world-system headed by neoliberal finance capital. Through close readings of texts by authors such as Mia Couto, Suleiman Cassamo, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, Pepetela, and Ondjaki, this book asks: What factors drove literary production towards the figure of the spectre in Mozambique and towards dystopia in Angola? What emerging energies and social contradictions found shape in these generic idioms in ways that existing vocabularies were unable to express? What does the geo-temporal passage from spectrality to dystopia tell us about the history of capitalist development in southern Africa, and about the restructuring of political-economic parameters across the globe?

First of its kind, this essay collection examines the intellectual trajectory of Latin America’s foremost literary critic and dialectician, underscoring its relevance for contemporary debates on world literature. The volume shows how Schwarz’s concrete analyses of Brazilian literature and culture offer a theoretical blueprint to understand the literary registration of capitalism’s combined and uneven development. Exploring concepts such as misplaced ideas, objective form, and volubility, the contributors show how the nuance of Schwarz’s interpretive practice can be productively remodelled into a program for world-literary studies. Throughout the volume, Schwarz’s unparalleled contributions to cultural theory, long neglected in the Anglophone academy, are rigorously and creatively debated. Roberto Schwarz and World Literature is a primer on literary criticism as concrete practice and an indispensable book for those interested in how literary form mediates social reality.

Situates the cultures of Portuguese-speaking Africa within the postcolonial, global era.

This publication is the result of a baseline study of the state of the higher education systems in the five Portuguese speaking countries in Africa (PALOP): Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Sao Tome and Principe. The project was undertaken by an African international expert in the field of higher education studies and was fully sponsored and supported by the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA). The report offers a historical overview of the development of higher education in PALOP from colonial times to the present. The main objective of this baseline study is to map the landscape and dynamics of change in the higher education systems of PALOP countries. It focuses on describing the latest developments of trends of expansion, financing, governance and policy reforms closely linked to the development of higher education systems in these countries. Furthermore, the study will facilitate an informed debate and the dissemination of knowledge on the role of higher education for development in Africa.

Genre studies and genre approaches to literacy instruction continue to develop in many regions and from a widening variety of approaches. Genre has provided a key to understanding the varying literacy cultures of regions, disciplines, professions, and educational settings. GENRE IN A CHANGING WORLD provides a wide-ranging sampler of the remarkable variety of current work. The twenty-four chapters in this volume, reflecting the work of scholars in Europe, Australasia, and North and South America, were selected from the over 400 presentations at SIGET IV (the Fourth International Symposium on Genre Studies) held on the campus of UNISUL in Tubarão, Santa Catarina, Brazil in August 2007—the largest gathering on genre to that date. The chapters also represent a wide variety of approaches, including rhetoric, Systemic Functional Linguistics, media and critical cultural studies, sociology, phenomenology, enunciation theory, the Geneva school of educational sequences, cognitive psychology, relevance theory, sociocultural psychology, activity theory, Gestalt psychology, and schema theory. Sections are devoted to theoretical issues, studies of genres in the professions, studies of genre and media, teaching and learning genre, and writing across the curriculum. The broad selection of material in this volume displays the full range of contemporary genre studies and sets the ground for a next generation of work.

Previous ed. (2005) has subtitle: State and society in transition.