Imagining a post-colonial Angola: Hiphop culture and the political enemies of the New Republic – PhD Dissertation

Abstract: “Angola’s postcolonial history is divided into three periods of civil war (1975-1991, 1992-1994 e
1998-2002) and national reconstruction (2002 – present). In these four decades, the voices of agents
who sought, through art, to express their critical visions about the context and their perspectives of
change, continued the path traversed by artists of the colonial period who sang and poetized their
dreams of independent and autonomous nation. Since the end of the 1980s hip-hop culture has
emerged in Luanda, not only as a form of entertainment, but mainly as a way of expression and
communication among young people about the reality lived in the country under a civil war and
the expectations of a better future. The activists of the hip-hop movement are in constant dialogue
with the cultural productions made since the struggle for national liberation and with the historical
factors that reflect on the present. Today, they constitute the main challengers of the political model
and the existing inequalities in Angola, being thus treated like political enemies of the new republic.
In this thesis, we present the historical context that allows the formation of the hip-hop scene in
Angola, the phases covered by this movement and its role in the dispute of imagery and
construction of the current society project.”

Keywords: Angola; post-colonialism; youth; hip-hop; rap music; quotidian narrative; dissident
bodies.

 

The full thesis is available, in Portuguese and in open access at Unicamp’s repository, and can be read at the following link.

 

Photograph: Beth Balboni (CC-BY-SA 2.0)

ANO

2019

AUTORES

Jaqueline Lima Santos

EDITORES

Unicamp