Lopes, Rui and Natalia Telepneva, eds. Globalizing Independence Struggles of Lusophone Africa: Anticolonial and Postcolonial Politics (London: Zed Books, 2025). 289 pages.

Resumo

This is a tightly conceived and well-crafted edited volume. Globalizing

Independence Struggles of Lusophone Africa offers a compelling frame for better understanding the anticolonial movements that took shape in Portuguese-speaking Africa in the mid-twentieth century. Framing these independence struggles as constitutive rather than peripheral to global decolonising histories, the goal of the volume is to better understand how “specific forms of anticolonial politics and imperial dissolution shaped today’s world order, from the United Nations (UN) to the reification of the nation-state.” The editors achieve this in several ways. First, by emphasising revolution as “ideational power” that carried behind it local contexts, Lusophone Africa can be seen as “constitutive and transformative of the larger history of anticolonialism” (p. 1). Second, the chapters attend to political actors across the ideological spectrum, seeing revolutionary visions and alliances of the left and the right playing out in the region. In this way, we appreciate how this region became a battleground not only for the ideologies of communism and capitalism but also the racial politics of Southern Africa. And while the editors admit that there are decisively more chapters on Angola, the volume does home in on case studies of all parts of Lusophone Africa to show how each tells us more about the larger processes underway in this era.