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Forms of Disappointment: Cuban and Angolan Narrative after the Cold War

2023; Duke University Press; Volume: 75; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00104124-10752794

1945-8517

Marta Hernández Salván,

Cuban History and Society

Millar’s Forms of Disappointment is a unique comparative analysis of a body of works produced in the post–Cold War period. The book revisits the fraught intervention of Cuba in Angola by showing how post-Soviet cultural production demystifies the official redemptive narrative of Cuban heroism and how the fictional representation of this traumatic event has been overlooked by critics. It also sheds light on the post-Soviet Cuban experience, which has been the object of significant scholarship that the monograph enhances in exciting and novel ways. By focusing on the Global South instead of the customary North-South relationship favored by Cuba experts, the book contributes significantly to the fields of Cuban, African, and Latin American studies. Millar constructs her argument by seamlessly navigating literary canons from different cultural traditions and by showing an exceptional mastery of the genealogy of literary tropes. This comparativist prism allows for a much more nuanced reading that avoids the argumentative deadlock of Cuban exceptionalism. It opens Cuba to the world, and most importantly it revaluates its legacy as a postcolonial country marked by the experience of the slave trade and the Black liberation movements that transformed the Global South in the 1960s and 1970s.One of the most original aspects of Millar’s book is its theorization of disappointment. The book covers a span of time comprised between the 1970s historical crisis and the early 1990s, a period when disappointment refers to the “everyday negotiations that these worlds have engendered, especially as registered in affective relationships both with other subjects and with the past” (xx). Cuba is thus disappointed from its leadership role in the Global South, and Angola is disappointed from its role as center of global revolutionary solidarity. Millar also understands disappointment as a structure of feeling in Raymond Williams’s sense—that is, as something ephemeral and thus prone to constant change. If the feeling itself is only a transitory state, it can take the form of different and perhaps contradictory conditions such as nostalgia and melancholy, but also enthusiasm. Angola and Cuba are analyzed conjointly because they both share a colonial history and a history of twentieth-century socialist revolutions: the 1959 Cuban Revolution and Angola’s 1975 independence from Portugal.The monograph is divided into five chapters that alternate between a focus on Angolan and Cuban cultural production, and it also includes one more chapter comparing them. In the first chapter, Millar analyzes Boaventura Silva Cardoso’s novels Maio mês de Maria (1997; May, Month of Mary), and Mãe, materno mar (2001; Mother, Maternal Sea) to argue that its formal aspects speak of a political ethos struggling to find a form. In this sense, the form mirrors the social structures of feeling that arise in the violence of the transition from colony into independence. Ambiguities in the first novel prompt Millar to read the people’s political power as a possibility that is not fulfilled. The chapter ends with a nuanced reading of the novels by showing the unabating nature of the postcolonial heritage of corruption and clientelism while also pointing at the promise symbolized by textual ellipsis and the creative power of collective voices.The second chapter analyzes the ties of transatlantic solidarity by analyzing how the Angolan and Cuban films O herói (The Hero, 2004) and Kangamba (2008) represent the rhetoric of revolutionary collaboration. The author notes that Kangamba mystifies the early years of the revolution by depicting them as a period of consensus and heroic virtue when deploying the communitarian aesthetics of the third cinema without questioning them. In contrast to the national brotherly bonds created in Kangamba, O herói depicts different notions of solidarity based on the building of nontraditional communal bonds. Whereas both films express nostalgia for the solidarity between Cuba and Angola, they offer different responses to the disappointment that follows the end of utopia. While Kangamba refuses to abandon an anti-imperialist rhetoric as the twenty-first century unfolds, O herói instead ironizes about the revolutionary cinematic conventions that it represents, and in this sense the disappointment that it narrates becomes part of its critical apparatus.The third chapter presents a very compelling reading of Eliseo Alberto de Diego’s Caracol Beach by focusing on its transmediatic use of third cinema’s filmic grammar, which comprises the most iconic and persuasive representation of idealized revolutionary heroes. Scenes are narrated as in movie scripts, with explanations that imitate voiceovers and stage directions. Millar deftly draws on Lilian Guerra’s hyperreal futurity to describe the geographical or spatial shifts occurring in the novel. If the hyperreal seeks the creation of a temporality where the present is read as future, in Caracol Beach the memories or flashbacks of the protagonist point to the return to the island. Symbolic representations of disappointment emerge through the outcasts to offer a counterpoint to the hyperreal representation of the revolution as virtual reality.In chapter four, José Eduardo Agualusa’s novel O ano em que Zumbi Tomou o Rio (2002; The Year that Zumbi Took Rio) describes contemporary racial politics in Brazil and postcolonial politics in Angola through the depiction of the violent protest of marginalized populations in their demands for greater political participation. Drawing on Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s “epistemologies of the South,” Millar argues that the subject of the novel is formed dialogically between both communities by pointing to the colonial legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. By arguing that the novel opposes the criminalization of the uprisal, the author shows its political potential through an engaging interpretation of the parallelism between the African movements of decolonization of the 1950s through the 1970s and the Brazilian struggles for racial equality of the twentieth century.Chapter 5 studies the postmodern take on the historical novel genre by showing that unlike in socialist realism, characters no longer have agency over history. This is the case of Padura’s El hombre que amaba a los perros (2009; The Man Who Loved Dogs), a reconstruction of Trotsky’s saga of exile, his assassination by Catalan’s anarchist and NKVD agent Ramón Mercader, and the fictional relation of these two historical characters with the narrator, Cuban novelist Iván. The lack of historical agency is shown through the actions of waiting and the deferred act of writing, and the challenges that they pose to the teleological temporality of revolutionary discourse. As in other chapters, Millar argues that the hope for a revolutionary future is also the disappointment in its deferral, and that the two affective modes coexist.The final chapter studies Pepetela’s novels Jaime Bunda, agente secreto (2000; Jaime Bunda, Secret Agent) and Jaime Bunda e a morte do americano (2003; Jaime Bunda and the Death of the American) and their portrayal of Angola as a kleptocratic oligarchy. The author reads the reformulation of detective novels’ conventions, as evidence of a larger critique that understands neoimperialist exploitation as a remnant of colonial imperial practices and violence. Millar shows pastiche’s critical aspect by analyzing its parody of Ian Fleming’s James Bond works. Unlike other cultural critics, she argues that pastiche has a political function, though I think that neither Fredric Jameson nor Linda Hutcheon would disagree with Millar’s assessment that pastiche is indeed a form of criticism. What pastiche doesn’t offer in Pepetela’s work, however, is a utopian horizon, and that’s why I agree with the Marxian interpretation that negates its political nature.The epilogue discusses the recurrence of what Millar terms a “suspended legibility,” a metaliterary phenomenon indicating a type of textuality that cannot be read, written, or interpreted. In her reading of the different texts, this phenomenon persists as a symptom that reveals the silences surrounding the Global South’s political allegiances, which produce contradictory passions that she calls forms of disappointment. These works don’t speak from the political resentment produced by these experiences; instead, they offer other ways of social transformation.Millar reads disappointment as a collective feeling created polyphonically through the work of art, and as a symbol of subaltern political potential. The allegorical figures of Cardoso’s novels and the collective religious beliefs are interpreted as a symbol of the popular will, which speaks of the past collective enthusiasm for the revolution’s promise and the potential of marginal people to remake their communities. The Angolan film O herói points back to a revolutionary style of filmmaking by asking collective participation from the audience. In Pepetela’s crime fiction novels, the exoticized feminine narrative voice breaks up the hegemonic viewpoint of the other narrators. The form that such political communities or means of struggle would take are at best elusive and at worst iterations of unsuccessful modes of activism, yet the book offers a dazzling analysis of the emotional contradictions that are consubstantial to the political. Along with Kaja Silverman, I think that attending to the structure of desire, even when we know that desire is unfulfillable, will set up the conditions of possibility for the emergence of an ethics, even when we don’t know what its structure looks like.