Imbondeiro: notes for an editorial history based on the Imbondeiro Collection

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.11606/va.v26.n2.2025.227733

Keywords:

Imbondeiro, Colecção Imbondeiro, PIDE, Censorship, Angola, Colonialism

Abstract

In colonial times, with the contradictions this period entailed, Leonel Cosme and Garibaldino De Andrade laid, from Huíla, the foundations for the circulation of Angolan literature. Colecção Imbondeiro (68 volumes) was the publisher's most prolific series. The publishing project raised controversies among the politicized fringes of the anti-colonial cultural elites, also drawing PIDE’s attention, which monitored, censored, and repressed it. It was shut down in 1965, after the massive seizure of copies and printing material by PIDE. This text presents the results of a research carried out in archives and literary sources, about one of the first wide-ranging publishing projects printed on Angolan soil before Independence. It also briefly discusses the reasons for its poor reception in post-colonial Angola, related to the relative lack of political positioning on the country’s future.

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Author Biography

  • Noemi Alfieri, Universidade Nova de Lisboa

    FCT CEEC Researcher at CHAM – Centre for the Humanities Centre for the Humanities at the Humanities and Social Sciences of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (2023–29). (2023–29). Member of the Board of Directors of CHAM, as Deputy Director for Graduate Studies and Research.

    Her current project, “Mapping anti-colonial networks through literature. Transnational connections of African thinkers in the reconfiguration of space and thought (1950s - 70s)”, focuses on the connections between the editorial projects Mensagem (Lisbon), Présence Africaine (Paris and Dakar) and Black Orpheus (Ibadan). She was a Visiting Fellow at the ASCL — African Studies Centre (U. Leiden, 2024) and the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence (U. Bayreuth, 2022/23 ay). At the ACM, she was also awarded Collaborative Funding for the Postdoctoral Working Group: “Digital Trans*formations in Africa: A Space for Intellectual and Material Capital” (Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, U. Bayreuth), which she coordinates and co-convenes with colleagues from UB and Humboldt U. Berlin. Former Post-Doctoral Research Fellow of the FCT-ID project Afrolab: Building African Literatures. Institutions and Consecration inside and outside the Portuguese-Language Space 1960-2020, based at CLEPUL — Centre for Lusophone and European Literatures and Cultures (FLUL, University of Lisbon — March to September 2022). In 2021, she was a Member of the PNL Evaluation Team. She is a Member of the Editorial Board of Práticas da História, Associate Member of CREPAL — Centre de recherches sur les pays lusophone (Sorbonne Nouvelle Université, France); a member of the research group Áfricas (UERJ-UFRJ). In November 2019, she researched at CEM Eduardo Augusto Kwamba (ISCED-Luanda). She is also a team member of the FCT-funded Projects AFROLAB (UL) and WOMENLIT — Women's Literature: Memories, Peripheries and Resistance in the Lush-Afro-Brazilian Atlantic (CHAM, NOVA-FCSH). Member of the COST Action 18126 — “Writing Urban Places” (EU). Her research focuses on African editorial projects from the 1950s to the 1970s. She’s concerned with the mobility of objects, people, and ideas through the transnational networks established within Africa, Europe, and South America by negritudinists, Pan-African or anti-colonial writers and intellectuals in those decades, with special attention on the under-representation of women’s agency in the historical and academic narrations produced about and in those cultural environments. She gained her PhD in Portuguese Studies (History of the Book and Textual Criticism) from NOVA-FCSH with the dissertation: “(Re)building Identity through Conflict: An Approach to African Literatures written in Portuguese (1961-74)”. This dissertation was founded by FCT-IP and received an Honorable Mention for the Mário Soares Prize-EDP Foundation (2021). She holds a BA degree in Modern Languages and Literatures (Spanish and Portuguese, 2013) from the Università degli Studi of Turin, Italy. She holds an MA degree in Modern Languages and Literatures from the same university, with a dissertation on Angolan literature (2015).

    She is interested in the circulation of printed materials, ideas, and their agents, as well as in their reception, currently focusing on African editorial projects from the 1950s to the 1970s, with an emphasis on Angolan Literature. She is concerned with the mobility of objects, people, and ideas through the transnational networks established within Africa, Europe, and Latin America by negritudinists, Pan-African or anti-colonial writers and intellectuals in those decades, with particular attention on the under-representation of female agency in the historical and academic narrations produced about and in those cultural environments. She endorses a decolonial, feminist and intersectional approach to academic research, writing, and the arts, joining collective anticolonial and antiracist literary and artistic projects.

     

References

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Published

2025-12-24

Issue

Vol. 26 No. 2 (2025): Angola - collection, memory, and literature

Section

Dossiê 47: Angola: acervo, memória e literatura

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Copyright (c) 2025 Noemi Alfieri

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Imbondeiro: notes for an editorial history based on the Imbondeiro Collection. Via Atlântica, São Paulo, v. 26, n. 2, p. 18, 2025. DOI: 10.11606/va.v26.n2.2025.227733. Disponível em: https://revistas.usp.br/viaatlantica/article/view/227733.. Acesso em: 4 jan. 2026.