Colonialism and anticolonialism in João Melo's angolan tales

Abstract

This analysis aims at relating the short story collections Imitação de Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir and Filhos da pátria, written by the Angolan fictionist João Melo, to the colonialism and the anticolonialism, which are directly implicated with post-colonialism. Post-colonial literature reflects about the peripheral condition and its contextual relation. As a colonialist aspect to be considered, there is the male domination in the first of these collections of short stories and the organization of the Angolan post-independence elite in the second of them; as anticolonialist, the thoughtfull about the female condition of Simone de Beauvoir through the pursuit of the emancipation of female characters in the first book, and the national and individual identity issues in the second one. Sartrian engagement, resized under post-colonialist perspective, presents itself as an anti neocolonialist strategy, challenging the neocolonialism, represented by the contemporary dystopia and the postmodern formalism, this one subverted by the metalanguage, the parody and the reversion of its reading expectations, in the reasoning of Melo.