The counter-narrative tradition and angolan literary nationalism

Abstract

This article problematizes the traditional historiographical perspective that establishes literary nationalism as the exclusive criterion for understanding the historicity of the Angolan novel. By framing the literary production from 1880 to 1940 as “proto-nationalist” (a nativist consciousness read as a preparatory phase for a political project of Independence), the transfer of this sociological yardstick to literature empties the aesthetic agency of the works, judging them by what they “were not yet”. Countering teleological readings and drawing on the “economy of sorcery” (Mbembe, 2001) and “spiraling time” (Martins, 2023), the text outlines another Interpretive path: the existence of a “tradition of counter-narrative” between 1888 and 1974. The Investigation of aesthetic-political strategies In works by Pedro Félix Machado, Alfredo Troni, António de Assis Júnior, Fernando Castro Soromenho, Óscar Ribas, and Luandino Vieira reveals authors who acted, at the crossroads of the text, as architects of an epistemic sabotage. Such writing mechanisms demonstrate that the Angolan novel does not merely narrate decolonization, but embodies it. Thus, it is concluded that the “crossroads” (Martins, 2023; Santos, 2025) constitutes the central analytical category for apprehending this historical density, making the narrative a continuous territory of reinvention and resistance.

Submission: Mar 17, 2026 ⊶ Accepted: Apr 24, 2026