The Revolution Will Be a Poetic Act

Foreword by Lanie Millar

This book is a collection of essays and speeches by Mário Pinto de Andrade, the Angolan literary critic, cultural theorist, and political activist, and one of Africa’s most important 20th-century intellectuals. His writings explore the task of intellectual emancipation of colonised people, which he saw as predicated on the necessary project of political decolonisation.

As anti-colonial movements got underway, Andrade wrote extensively about the urgent necessity for Africans to turn away from European cultural and political models. He argued that communities emerging from colonisation should focus on voices from within the designated communities, on self-representation, and on horizontal relationships among Black, African, and decolonising peoples.

Andrade played a key role in theorising the international reach of the revolutionary 20th-century poetry and literature, Black cultural vindication, and African liberation. In his ethical commitment to moving away from focusing solely on the relationship between the colonial occupier and the colonised, he instead promoted ideas and actions that would construct mutual understanding among decolonising communities.

Andrade’s work offers models to rethink race and nation as analytic categories and is particularly relevant not only to scholars of African decolonisation movements but to anyone engaged in contemporary conversations about race, belonging, and political community.