The Stories within History: Mapping the Nation in João Paulo Borges Coelho’s Museu da Revolução

Abstract

Museu da Revolução, the most recent novel by the Mozambican writer João Paulo Borges Coelho, offers the reader a shrewd and thorough question about how to deal in a thoughtful and restorative way with the Mozambican past in its relationship with the legacies of coloniality in post-coloniality. Following the writer in this complex and plural exercise of recognizing other stories, narratives and memories constructed as minors within a larger History, this article intends to articulate with postcolonial worldliness the emerging vigor of post-memory studies. Precisely, in its ability to interact with colonial and decolonial ancestry from a perspective of historical reparation, the duty of memory and aesthetic and civic citizenship attentive to the understanding and deconstruction of old surviving logics of coloniality in the global post-colonial human present.