African Cultural Studies
Researching and teaching the languages and expressive cultures of Africa and Africans around the world since 1964

Luís Madureira

Position title: Professor; Interim Chair; Director of African Studies Program

Email: lmadurei@wisc.edu

Phone: (608) 262-2093

Address:
1470 Van Hise

Education

  • Ph.D. University of California, San Diego

Bio

Luís Madureira earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include Luso-Brazilian colonial and postcolonial studies, Modernism and Modernity in Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean, early modern and colonial studies, and theatre and performance in Africa. He has published two books and several articles on these and related topics.

Research

Currently working on a book-length project that centers on the complex ways in which Mozambican drama (ranging from the Marxist-Leninist republic to neoliberal, multiparty democracy) negotiates and re-articulates ethnic, class and gender identities both against and alongside dominant nationalist ideologies. His second on-going project examines several Luso-African historical novels and explores the entanglements inherent to the adoption of a classical European genre buttressed by the very notions of cultural difference, gendered subjectivity and teleological time that postcolonial reinterpretations of the past ostensibly seek to interrogate.

Selected Publications

Books
  • Cannibal Modernities: Postcoloniality and the Avant-garde in Brazilian and Caribbean Literature, 2005.
  • Imaginary Geographies in Portuguese and Lusophone African Literature: Narratives of Discovery and Empire, 2007.
Book Chapters and Articles
  • “’Performing Like There’s No Tomorrow’: Theatre, War, and Social Precarity in Mozambique,” in State and Culture in Postcolonial Africa: Enchantings (Indiana University Press, 2017)
  • “Adrift Between Neoliberalism and the Revolution: Cape Verde and the South Atlantic in Germano Almeida’s Eva,” in The Global South Atlantic (Fordham University Press: 2018)
  • “No Telephone to Heaven: Post-Colonial Writing, the Pursuit of Freedom and Colonialism’s Genocidal Impulse,” in Post/Colonialism and the Pursuit of Freedom in the Black Atlantic (Routledge:  2018)
  • “Chronicles from the ‘Vulture Kingdom’: The Post-Colonial State in Question in Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa’s Historical Fiction” (forthcoming in Research in African Literatures, Spring 2019) 
  • “Lusophone Southern African Literature (Angola and Mozambique),” in A Companion to African Literatures  (forthcoming in 2020 by Wiley)

Awards & Honors

  • 2010 (Feb.-Dec.), Fulbright Teaching and Research Grant (Mozambique)
  • 2009-2011, Vilas Associate Award (UW-Madison)
  • 2006, University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, Samuel Stone Distinguished Alumnus Award
  • 2005, 2006, Instituto dos Arquivos Nacionais / Torre do Tombo Research fellowship
  • 2004, Luso-American Foundation for Development Research fellowship

Courses

Advising

Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, Gender and Environmental Studies, Theatre and Performance, Postcolonial Historical Fiction, Early Modern Studies