Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book allows us to see, as the Inquisition's respondents don the mask of dissemblance, the birth of what W. E. B Du Bois would term "double consciousness" and its consequences for black existence under racialized rule. It focuses on Africans in contemporary Paris which cites France's analogue to Portugal's lusofonia as embodying a transnational postcolonial cultural community. The advances of neoliberalism that came after the Cold War, and the ongoing dependencies that continue to affect Angola, Mozambique and other formerly colonised nations, have often meant that underdevelopment now is paired by disillusionment in the minds of many. The book attempts to trace this trajectory in the work of Angola's Manuel Rui, one of the poets whose work spans the anti-colonial as well as the post-independence periods.