Diminished returns: Mozambican masculinities in José Craveirinha's Xigubo and Paulina Chiziane's O Sétimo Juramento

Abstract

In the last fifteen years, gendered analysis of Mozambican cultural expression has become increasingly popular. This engagement with the country’s cultural output has successfully elucidated the gendered meanings underpinning both Portuguese colonial endeavour and the Marxist-Leninist rhetoric of the Mozambican anticolonial struggle. However, despite this growing interest in the sexual politics of the nation’s cultural texts, Mozambican masculinities remain understudied. This article recentres masculinities in works by two Mozambican authors: poet José Craveirinha, dubbed the founding father of Mozambican national literature, and contemporary novelist Paulina Chiziane, hailed as Mozambique’s foremost woman writer. Poststructuralist gender theory is used to propose that Craveirinha’s attempt to provide a counternarration to colonial mythologies of black masculinity through engagement with an aesthetics of negritude ultimately perpetuates imperial imaginings of black femininity. Chiziane’s text, meanwhile, is shown to make strategic use of realism and parody in order to satirize the gender politics at the heart of early anticolonial writing.

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