This edited collection aims to identify memories and perceptions of African subjects who lived the process of struggle for independence and the experience of colonial wars, shaping their identity on the negotiation between personal memory and the narrative proposed by official history. It also includes memories of those who have experienced these periods in the colonial metropolis, which allow the contributors to compare the narratives centered on European memories of Africa and what was experienced in the African continent. The book explores how oral culture can become the domestic space of people who had to leave the African continent and had to recreate their identities inside a different society, quite often the colonizers' one, and how their life abroad has been shaped by the recreation of their linguistic social and culture paradigm through the memory of their oral culture.
Chapter 1: Introduction: Presence, Embodiment, and the Politics of Remembering.- Part 1: Historical and Social Paths of Afrodescedence.- Chapter 2: From Colonial Memory to Griotic Fabulation: Re-writings of the Nation and Disputes over Meaning in Angola.- Chapter 3: The Carrancas Massacre: Orality and Afro-Brazilian Memory of the Bloodiest Slave Rebellion in the South-East of the Brazilian Empire.- Chapter 4: The Family Memories of Captain Prego: An Analysis based on the Fortune-Misfortune Complex (Region of Vertentes, Minas Gerais in the Post-Abolition Context).- Chapter 5: The Yorùbá s Oríkì and the Sacred Verses of Ifá: Spaces of Oral and Collective Memory.- Chapter 6: Listening to an Other Lisbon: Urban Narratives by Black and Afro-Descendant Women.- Chapter 7: Traces of the Glass House in New Orleans, Louisiana.- Chapter 8: Territory and identity in Lumbanga; oral memories of Afro-Chilean culture , by Cristian Báez Lazcano.- Part 2: Oral Heritage into writing.- Chapter 9: Creating Literature through Memory: the Case of Ng g wa Thiong o s Weep Not, Child (1952-1964).- Chapter 10: Memory and Poetic Creolisation in Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel`s Work.- Chapter 11: Hauntings of Memory in Child of the Dark: the Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus.- Chapter 12: Approaches to Oral Traditions in African Diasporas of Brazil.- Part 3: Performative Expression of Oral Memory.- Chapter 13: Creole Transformations: Dino d Santiago s New World under Construction.- Chapter 14: Creole songs of Seychelles: an Indian Ocean musical memorial, a call to Pan-Créolité.- Chapter 15: The Fado dance: Body, Memory, Stories and Affections.-Chapter 16: Tumba Francesa: an Afro-Cuban Memorial Apparatus within the Caribbean Basin.- Chapter 17: Dance, Memory and Orality in the Rebita (Luanda, Angola).- Chapter 18:Black Dances in the Afro-diasporas: Oxlajuj B'aqtun Dances, Brazil-Africa Cooperation and Mask.- Testimonials.
Francesca Negro is Associated researcher of the Centre for Comparative Studies, and Centre of Theatre Studies of the University of Lisbon, Portugal, where she also teaches Intercultural Communication.
Inocência Mata is Associate professor at the Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon, Portugal, and Coordinator of African Studies ERASMUS Program.
