Dissertation Defense | Torin Spangler
Schedule
Thu, 16 Apr, 2026 at 03:00 pm
UTC-04:00Location
159 George Street, Providence, RI, United States, Rhode Island 02906 | Providence, RI
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Please join us on Thursday, April 16 at 3:00pm in the George Monteiro Conference Room of Meiklejohn House (159 George St.) as Torin Spangler, PhD candidate in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, defends his dissertation, Steamboats and Kiandas: The Nineteenth-Century Riverscape in Modern Angolan Literature.Committee
Leonor Simas-Almeida, Co-Advisor
Luiz Valente, Co-Advisor
Gabriel Rocha, Reader
Abstract
In this dissertation, I examine the history of the Lower Kwanza River valley and textual representations of that space. From heartland of Mbundu kingdoms to conduit of the traffic in enslaved Africans and axis for the nineteenth-century steamboat trade in “legitimate” commercial products, the Kwanza has a rich, if fraught, history as a contact zone between various peoples in Angola and the broader Atlantic world. Although it is now a national symbol for all Angolans, an essential thread in the establishment of that symbolism has emerged from a literary tradition associating the Kwanza with the cultural and economic activities of a subset of late-nineteenth-century “angolenses” and their struggles against marginalization under modern colonialism. Through literary works by António Assis Júnior, José Eduardo Agualusa and Arnaldo Santos (among others), the Kwanza is viewed through the lens of a sometimes romanticized, sometimes problematized, space-time of the “golden age” of Angola’s nativistic bourgeoisie and its frustrated efforts to consolidate an autonomous local identity in the awkward transition between ages of colonialism. As river traffic gives way to trainlines, an accelerated colonial occupation makes river-bound mercantile elites obsolete, but not before their semi-aquatic world is immortalized in writing and forever bound-up with a shifting and multilayered literary Kwanza riverscape. I argue that this textual construct has been intensely metahistoriographic from its inception, generating a palimpsest of oral and written literary and historical references that has inspired multiple generations of Angolan writers.
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Where is it happening?
159 George Street, Providence, RI, United States, Rhode Island 02906Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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