About

Luis Madureira is a professor associated with the Department of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The department specializes in researching and teaching the languages and expressive cultures of Africa and Africans around the world, emphasizing the development and application of analytical, linguistic, and methodological tools. These tools enable students to work effectively and imaginatively across regions, languages, cultural forms, methodologies, and disciplines. The department offers both undergraduate and graduate programs focused on African perspectives, culture, and languages, including Arabic, Hausa, Swahili, Wolof, Yoruba, and Zulu. While the specific research focus and contributions of Luis Madureira are not detailed on the page, his association with this department indicates his involvement in the study and teaching of African languages and cultures.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Economic history
• History
• Media studies
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Postcolonial Historical Drama and the Aporias of Tricontinentalism in Angola

  Comparative Literature Studies · 2025-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT This article analyzes the veteran Angolan writer Pepetela’s (Artur Maurício Carlos Pestana dos Santos) 1979 historical play, A revolta da casa dos ídolos (The Revolt of the House of Idols). The historical episode Pepetela transforms into drama dates back to the initial contacts between the Portuguese Crown and the Kings of Kongo in the early sixteenth century. The protagonist of Pepetela’s historical drama is a Kongolese blacksmith named Nanga who becomes the popular leader of an anachronistic rebellion against the local potentate’s collusion with the incipient transatlantic slave trade. While Pepetela’s imaginative recreation of history in the play ultimately rehearses a hermeneutics of the present, this article argues that the play’s anachronism does not reaffirm the necessity and “truth” of the contemporaneous anti-imperialist struggle, that is, the strategic and ideological links between Angola’s nationalist project and the internationalist or tricontinental pursuit of a more just and egalitarian world order. Rather, A revolta contrapuntally explores the limit at which revolutionary internationalism risks reproducing the logic of neocolonialism. The play broaches the possibility that the tricontinental decolonization project may have been, from its inception, undermined by a fatal, internal flaw.

  PublisherDOI

• <b>Postcolonial people: the return from Africa and the remaking of Portugal</b> , <b>Postcolonial people: the return from Africa and the remaking of Portugal</b> , by Christoph Kalter, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022, 351 pp., $110 (hbk), ISBN: 978-1-10883-769-9

  Politics Religion & Ideology · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Media studies
  PublisherDOI

• Lusophone Southern African Literature (Angola, Mozambique)

  2021-01-09

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• ANÁLISE ESTRATÉGICA DE RELAÇÕES COMPLEXAS

  2019-01-01

  articleSenior author

• A Supplement to the White Man's Burden: Lobo Antunes, History, the Colonial Wars, and the April Revolution

  Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies · 2017-03-16 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: This essay opens with an examination of Portuguese novels about the colonial wars which seek to expose the referential emptiness of the Salazarist imperial mystique, and present its “civilizing mission” as an example of the very un-Historicity which Hegel notoriously ascribes to Africa. Such texts arguably employ “postcolonial” strategies of reading empire. It is precisely this gesture that Lobo Antunes refuses to perform. His fiction suggests that to try to link the protagonist's colonial story with Angola’s narrative of resistance would only confirm his complicity with the colonial project. By the same token, the April Revolution appears bereft of historical meaning, reduced to one in an infinite chain of exchangeable signifiers mobilized to name a desire for totality that cannot but fall short of its object. In Antunes's fiction, Portugal’s quest for universality seems as illusory as the estadonovista yearning for the resurgence of an etiolated imperial glory.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Adrift Between Neoliberalism and the Revolution

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2017-12-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This explores how the fraught and troubled historical links between sexuality and politics through a reading of Cape Verdean novelist Germano Almeida’s <italic>Eva</italic> . The paradox between the unrepeatable instance and its incessant “iterability” underpins the novel’s representation of two metaphorically linked domains of experience: politics and sexuality. I suggest that this repetitive or compulsive performativity relates directly to a sustained interrogation of the contradictory and often precarious dialogic entanglements that inform the constitution (or “performances”) of Cape Verdean (national, racial, gender) identity within a broad South Atlantic cultural and geopolitical space that encompasses not only Portugal (as the former colonial power), but also Brazil and continental Africa. Thus, the novel consistently refuses (sometimes in problematic ways) to fix identity in unequivocal terms and muddles the corporeal signs of absolute alterity that we routinely imagine to be located in the bodies of “others.”

  PublisherDOI

• Where “God Is Like a Longing”: Theater and Social Vulnerability in Mozambique

  Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks · 2013-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  On the first two days of September 2010, after circulating intractably for days, rumor—"the poor man's bomb," as Achille Mbembe calls it—suddenly detonated in the sprawling, ramshackle periphery of Mozambique's capital.1 During the preceding two weeks, anonymous text messages2 had insistently called for widespread demonstrations against the steep and abrupt rise in the cost of living, arousing people to oppose the government-sanctioned increases in water and electricity rates and in the price of fuel, bread, and other basic food items. In the early morning of September 1, the shanty-towns erupted as announced. Thousands of people, for the most part youths, whom President Armando Guebuza's spokespeople would later brand "vandals and thugs," seized burning tires, boulders, pipes, variously sized tree trunks, and even torn-up bus stop equipment, to block the main roadways into the cities of Maputo and Matola.KeywordsColonial PeriodPortuguese LanguageColonial AuthorityRailroad WorkerCivil DisturbanceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

  PublisherDOI

• Cannibalizing the Colony: Cinematic Adaptations of Colonial Literature in Mexico and Brazil (review)

  Revista de estudios hispánicos · 2012-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reviewed by: Cannibalizing the Colony: Cinematic Adaptations of Colonial Literature in Mexico and Brazil Luis Madureira Gordon, Richard A. Cannibalizing the Colony: Cinematic Adaptations of Colonial Literature in Mexico and Brazil. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue UP, 2009. 233 pp. In Cannibalizing the Colony, Richard A. Gordon offers an unconventional reading of celluloid representations of the traumatic and contested “origins” of Mexico and Brazil. Aside from the striking yet unanalyzed datum that the majority of films about the colonial period are reportedly made in these two countries, Gordon’s chief motive for concentrating on Brazilian and Mexican cinematic production, in particular, is that historically both nations have evinced an enduring preoccupation with the question of national identity. The other important and related ground for this comparative study is precisely to demonstrate “the untapped potential” for scholarly analyses comparing Brazilian cultural production to that of Spanish America. For Gordon, the concern with national identity arises on the one hand from the two nations’ continuing political and cultural struggles around the assimilation and autonomy of indigenous peoples, and on the other from historical trajectories analogously defined by fraught and entangled processes of cultural hybridization. He argues that Mexican and Brazilian filmmakers creatively adapt, and at times radically transform colonial texts as a means not only of interrogating prevailing conceptions of national identity, but of persuasively engaging their spectators in imagining contestatory identity formations. Because Gordon understands these cinematic adaptations as complex and contradictory strategies of exercising control over the colonial archive, he provocatively calls them “anthropophagous adaptations.” In this way, the Brazilian modernist Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 recuperation of the Tupi cannibal ritual as a metaphor for the appropriation of hegemonic [End Page 139] cultural forms and epistemic models anticipates the modes in which these so-called colonial films aggressively (or revengefully) unmake their putative archival sources in an effort to shape their own narratives of national origins and identity. The central irony defining this cinematic “cannibalism” is that in attempting to subvert colonial domination and oppression by exercising dominance over texts that register a history of violence and dispossession, filmmakers run the risk of reproducing, rhetorically at least, some of the very practices they denounce and ultimately strive to displace. It is this agonistic dialectical relation between film and colonial archive, as it plays out in eight “emblematic” films (four from Brazil and four from Mexico), that Gordon undertakes to examine in the book. In the first of five chapters, he analyzes Humberto Mauro’s “re-creation” of Pêro Vaz de Caminha’s 1500 Letter of Discovery in Descobrimento do Brasil [The Discovery of Brazil] (1937). Mauro’s ostensibly faithful adaptation removes much of the contradictoriness and ambiguity from Caminha’s foundational text to construct a mythic narrative of contemporary Brazil emerging out of the cordial and peaceable encounter between Portuguese mariners and the coastal inhabitants of precolonial Brazil. As Gordon indicates, the filmmaker’s vision of the nation’s origins largely coincides with the ideology of the contemporaneous authoritarian regime led by Getúlio Vargas, which was keenly invested in underscoring the purportedly Catholic and Portuguese components of Brazil’s national character. In the end, Mauro’s cinematic reconstruction replicates the paternalistic outlook of its archival source. Insofar as it reinforces both the cultural dispossession and longstanding subjection of Brazil’s indigenous peoples, Descobrimento do Brasil exemplifies the colonial film in the full acceptation of the term. It stands as a kind of emblem for the gravest pitfall that may beset an “anthropophagous” cinematic adaptation of a colonial text. The second chapter turns to Cabeza de Vaca, Nicolás Echevarría’s loose 1991 adaptation of Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios (1542 and 1555), and Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Como era gostoso o meu francês (1971), a similarly liberal reconstruction of Hans Staden’s 1557 captivity narrative. Both filmmakers engage in “self-exoticizing” procedures which Gordon deems integral to the history of Latin America’s cultural production. Borrowing Stephanie Merrim’s and Roberto González Echevarría’s notion of “self-exoticization,” a strategy criollo writers deploy in the seventeenth century in order both to denounce the excesses of the colonial order and pursue...

  PublisherDOI

• “A Flat Carnivalesque Intention of Being a Cannibal,” Or, How (not) to Read the &lt;i&gt;Cannibal Manifesto&lt;/i&gt;

  Journal of Lusophone Studies · 2011-10-03 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this article, I propose that, in the face of the Manifesto antropófago’s inchoate endeavor to supersede a dominant narrative about the irresistible rise of modern rationality, the critic can either accept the terms of this attempted repudiation or reposition it within the very epistemological framework which that text seeks to displace. In accordance with this latter epistemic model, antropofagia cannot but appear contradictory. Yet the passages that seem paradoxical and nonsensical appear so only because their essential meaning cannot be fully grasped from this frame of reference. It is therefore the epistemological framework which informs our “re-readings” of the Manifesto—rather than a failure or banality intrinsic to the text—that produces what he or she may come to define as nonsense and paradox.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Owen, Hilary. Mother Africa, Father Marx: Women's Writing of Mozambique, 1948-2002. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2007. 274 pp.

  Luso-Brazilian Review · 2009-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• N. Silva

  Know Center Research GmbH (Austria)

  1 shared

• Bárbara Fischer

  Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

  1 shared

Labs

• African Cultural StudiesPI

Awards & honors

• Ebrahim Hussein Fellowship
• Aliko Songolo Summer Research Award