Phillip Rothwell, “Angola’s Answer to the Postcolonial Age: Pepetela's Jaime Bunda e a morte do americano”
Date:    Wed., February 28, 2007
Time:    5:00 - 6:30 pm
Place:   Room 479, Van Hise
Class visit to Seminar on Postcoloniality in the Portuguese-speaking World will take place on Thursday, March 1, at 2:30 pm.
Organizer: Luis Madureira

Phillip Rothwell (Ph.D. Cambridge University) is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Rutgers University. He is the author of A Postmodern Nationalist: Truth, Orality and Gender in the Work of Mia Couto (Bucknell, 2004) and A Canon of Empty Fathers: Paternity in Portuguese Narrative (Bucknell, 2007). Rothwell has edited three volumes on Portuguese and Lusophone-African literature and published widely in refereed journals on the literatures, cultures and intellectual history of Lusophone Africa, Portugal and Brazil. He is completing a manuscript entitled “Utopian Bodies: The Construction of Women in African Literature.” His current research focuses on what he terms “Empty Paternity” in Portuguese cultural production from the Renaissance to the present day.

Angolan secret agent Jaime Bunda (whose last name means “backside” in Portuguese) is decidedly one of the most original characters in contemporary Portuguese-language (Lusophone) African fiction. His inaugural appearance in Pepetela’s Jaime Bunda, agente secreto (2001) simultaneously marked the genesis of the detective genre in Angola. Like his rather more famous and far fitter British counterpart, this rotund, anti-heroic “James Bond without technology, this underdeveloped James Bond,” as his creator calls him, encounters a spectacular crime at the start of his latest adventure, “JaimeBunda and the Death of the American” (2003). But it is a crime nobody bothers to solve or investigate, for the Jaime Bunda narratives, by Pepetela’s own admission, are ultimately “false detective novels”, that is, “pretexts” for a mordant critique of contemporary Angolan politics, society … and American imperialism.

Arthur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos (b. 1941), better-known by his nom de guerre Pepetela (pestana [“eyelash”] in Umbundu), is one of Angola’s most important authors. He has published some thirteen novels—two of the more recent being Jaime Bunda, agente secreto (2001) and Jaime Bunda e a morte do Americano (2003)—two plays and a book of short stories. In 1997 he was awarded the Prémio Camões, the most prestigious literary prize in the Portuguese-speaking world. Pepetela’s life is steeped in the history of his native country, which went through a long and harrowing civil war (1975-2002) following the war of independence against Portugal (1961-75). As a university student, Pepetela joined the liberation movement and fought as a guerrilla in the anti-colonial struggle. After independence, he served as Vice-Minister of Education and currently teaches Sociology at Agostinho Neto University in Angola’s capital, Luanda.