Russell Hamilton’s Voices from an Empire: A Pioneering Study

• Main Author: David Brookshaw
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Portuguese Studies Association (APSA) 2016-11-01
• Series: Journal of Lusophone Studies
• Online Access: https://jls.apsa.us/index.php/jls/article/view/116

The study of African literature in Portuguese was a largely vacant field in universities in the USA and the UK in the 1960s, in contrast to the emerging study of Anglophone and Francophone African literatures, which were well under way as both Britain and France completed their processes of decolonization. In the 1960s, Gerald Moser had raised awareness of individual writers such as the neo-realist novelist Castro Soromenho, and Clive Willis had translated the ethnographic tales of Óscar Ribas; however, Russell Hamilton was the first to write a comprehensive, cohesive, and balanced study of the field in Voices from an Empire: A History of Afro-Portuguese Literature.