African Literatures in the Portuguese Language: Singularities

Abstract This article reflects on some textual and institutional elements that distinguish literary life in Portuguese-speaking African countries. These concern, firstly, the peculiarities of Portuguese empire. Combining precarity, epistemological backwardness, violence equal proportion, it inspired an artistic response was consolidated even before independences. Secondly, they relate to type decolonization produced these territories. Contrary majority other contexts, their independence not negotiated, but conquered through armed struggle. Thirdly, there are thematic formal aspects: “animal,” “dead,” internationalist geographical imaginary play a structuring role fields. Thus, this demonstrates how unique literatures, can also offer new data for analysis cultural goods twenty-first century.