Women authors from southern Angola: from silence to the construction of a plural canon

Abstract

This article offers a critical reflection on literature as a space for symbolic resistance, identity reconstruction, and cultural affirmation in Southern Angola, focusing on the work of Portuguese-speaking African women authors. Based on the observation that Angolan literary historiography has been constructed on the basis of selective and centralising criteria which privilege urban regions, especially Luanda, the study analyses the double invisibility faced by women writers from the south of the country, marked both by patriarchal dynamics and by geographical, editorial and sociocultural exclusions. Using a descriptive methodology based on documentary and bibliographic analysis, the study examines the works of authors such as Ana Paula Tavares, Alda Lara, Deolinda Rodrigues and Lourença Francisco, highlighting how their productions in poetry, prose, epistolary writing and oral tradition articulate memory, ancestry, territory and resistance. These texts denounce the persistent effects of colonialism, marginalisation and structural inequality in the Global South, while reaffirming community values, female knowledge and intergenerational bonds. By proposing southern Angola as a geopoetics of resistance, the work contributes to the debate on the reconfiguration of the Angolan literary canon, claiming a more representative space for peripheral female voices and local cultural practices. The study thus reinforces the importance of valuing these narratives as legitimate forms of aesthetic, political and sociocultural action, indispensable to the construction of a plural, inclusive national literature committed to symbolic justice and sustainable cultural development.