This dissertation traces how Cuban and Angolan novels published in the final decades of the twentieth century engage with the political and artistic projects promoted by and through the post-revolutionary socialist-aligned political systems. The dissertation sustains that there are a collection of textual practices that insert themselves into the official “orthodox” historiographic and literary debates by reconsidering not just historical moments in the past that are central to these debates, but also reference how these moments are written and read from an official point of view. By employing tactics of ironic citation, parody and anachronism, these works not only comment upon official readings of history and demands of post-revolutionary literature, but they also reveal “silences,” to use Rolph-Trouillot’s term, in the literary corpus and in the experiences of Angolan and Cuban people that these alternative corpuses represent. Through revision of official discourses, they present an alternative reading of present subjects’ interactions with the past. These practices, which together I have termed “poetics of disappointment,” allow an intervention into the discussions surrounding both the production and the criticism of contemporary Cuban and Angolan literatures from a variety of political perspectives. The dissertation analyzes Cubans Alejo Carpentier’s La consagración de la primavera, Reinaldo Arenas’ La loma del ángel and Eliseo Alberto’s Caracol Beach as well as Angolans Manuel Rui’s Memória de mar, J. E. Agualusa’s Nação crioula and Boaventura Cardoso’s Mãe, materno mar. On one hand, these works recall the monumental events that the Cuban Revolution and Angolan independence represented, evoking a collective optimism and sense of community forged among pueblos/ povos in the processes of decolonization and promoting movements for social justice. On the other hand, the novels analyzed point out the limits of programmatic interpretations of post-revolutionary history. Demonstrating positions of discomfort with the notions of messianic immanence, idealized racial synthesis and the aftermaths of violence and displacement that official sources rarely document, these novels both privilege and question literary creation as a way of negotiating this disappointment. / text

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The aim of this thesis is to investigate the highly moral ethic of social duty and responsibility which animates the work of Alejo Carpentier. In order to examine this theme, I have studied, in particular, the following six novels: ‘El reino de este mundo', Los pasos perdidos', ‘El acoso', El siglo de las luces', ‘El recurso del método', and ‘La consagración de la primavera'. In the Introduction, I have investigated the various philosophical questions raised by the concept of responsibility : the debate about freewill and determinism has been examined, and the Existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre has been chosen as the most helpful in an investigation of Carpentier's theory of responsibility, due to a great coincidence of thought between the two writers. The protagonists of the novels in question have been grouped according to various distinguishing tendencies or characteristics, and have been analysed in the light of the Sartrian concepts of good and bad faith. These groupings are as follows: “the deluded intellectual”, “two tyrants”, “the lesson of experience”, and “the committed individual”. The success, or failure, of these characters, in matching up to the goals of self-transcendence and responsible commitment posed by Carpentier has been charted throughout Chapters One to Four, and deductions have been made about the various forms of bad faith in which the characters indulge. The conclusions that I have drawn from this detailed investigation of characters in good and bad faith are, firstly, that Carpentier sees man's goal in life as the attainment of self-knowledge and the honest acceptance of responsibility for the self : once this state of good faith has been achieved, man is able to commit himself to the never-ending struggle for the improvement of the social situation. Acceptance of responsibility for the self is vital, in Carpentier's canon, for without such acceptance, positive commitment is impossible. Secondly, I have concluded that, according to Carpentier, commitment is an inevitable part of life, and that Carpentier's goal, then, is that we should actively commit ourselves to a positive cause through recognition of our responsibility for ourselves and our society, rather than tacitly accept the status quo through a passive or deterministic attitude.