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These ideas are also a starting point for a more extensive reflection about the effective meaning, at least as far as Portuguese colonial and postcolonial studies are concerned, of paradigmatic categories such as cultural, linguistic, and racial hybridism, or of the concept of “creoleness”, for they are the expression of a transcultural autochthonous society emerging in urban or semiurban spaces and characterised by the fusion of distinct migratory streams. Portuguese, Brazilians, other Europeans, Bantus, traders, missionaries, and slaves shared a common condition of eradication from the homeland and lived in a “double trance made of disadaptation and readaptation, deculturation or exculturation, acculturation or enculturation”.5
Furthermore, the relevance of the role played by a literary corpus sprouting in such a milieu is evident today: in addition to its contribution to cultural and postcolonial studies, and to the deepening and understanding of basic concepts such as “nationalism” and “creole”, the importance of its seminal function relative to the birth of modern Angolan literature and to the settlement of the dichotomy existing between colonial and national literature is beyond doubt. An abrupt definition of all poetry and fiction written in Angola before 1948 as simply colonialist, exotic, and assimilationist overseas literature—retaining only aspects such as alienation, descriptiveness, or the Portuguese colonial point of view—seems to be a gross historical and cultural deformation since, even as far as Angola is concerned, the rise of national consciousness is a slow and deep maturation process.5 Generally, this rise of consciousness contributes to a series of ethnic, social, religious, political, and ideological factors and is unlikely to start suddenly on the eve of independence.