Stephen Henighan – författare

Angola, a nation formed by the transatlantic slave trade, has a unique identity in Africa, enshrined in its hybridized, outward-looking, Portuguese-speaking culture and expressed by its rich literature. The development of a distinctive national prose tradition can be found throughout colonial Angola’s fascinating history, shaped by the slave trade’s impact on the formation of Angolan society and the creation of a nascent mixed-race national bourgeoisie strongly connected to Brazil. Creolized Angolans imagined the future nation in their literature – a vision brought to fruition through nationalist activism.The emergence of anticolonial writers in the 1940s consolidated the fissures found in Angola in the buildup to its War of Independence (1961–75). Drawing from rich historical records, Stephen Henighan traces the race debates among proindependence groups and examines work by exiles writing in 1960s Paris and Algiers, guerrilla memoirs by women, fiction written in concentration camps, and Brazilian and Cuban influences on Angolan prose. Prominent Angolan intellectuals such as Agostinho Neto, José Luandino Vieira, and Pepetela play parts in this panorama, as do international figures such as Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon, and Henry Kissinger, who are seen from fresh, unexpected angles. The story culminates in Angola’s 1975 independence and the country’s resolve to found national literary institutions.The product of nearly two decades of research, and only the first part of what will be a foundational work, Fissured Ground illustrates how Angolan literature contributes to a unified national identity and connects to the global struggle for independence.

A Single Nation presents a narrative history of Angola’s first fifty years of nationhood and of the careers of its major modern prose writers. This book charts the challenges Angolan authors faced in imagining and sustaining a national literature after independence, engaging with questions of decolonization, the legacies of the slave trade, and the role of a culturally – and often racially – syncretized bourgeoisie in shaping visions of a modern African nation-state through literature..Opening with the declaration of independence amid Cold War conflict in 1975, this work offers fresh perspectives on events such as the attempted coup of May 1977 and the pivotal confrontation with apartheid South Africa at Cuito Cuanavale in 1987–88. It brings into focus the transnational dimensions of Cuban-Angolan cooperation, the devastation of the civil war of the 1990s between the governing MPLA and Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA movement, debates over race and identity, and the corruption unleashed by the oil boom in the early twenty-first century. The literary institutions created by socialist Angola were remarkable for their nation-building ambition. Stephen Henighan charts the conditions under which Angolan writers worked after the Cold War and analyzes texts by writers from Pepetela to José Eduardo Agualusa, Ondjaki, and Chó do Guri.The successor to Henighan’s companion study of the pre-independence period, Fissured Ground, this work combines narrative history with meticulous literary analysis and a broad view of the reception of Angolan writing in Europe and the Americas. A Single Nation offers an engrossing and enlightening account of a distinctive African nation and its literature.

Ernesto Cardenal and Sergio Ramírez are two of the most influential Latin American intellectuals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Addressing Nicaragua's struggle for self-definition from divergent ethnic, religious, generational, political, and class backgrounds, they constructed distinct yet compatible visions of national history, anchored in a reappraisal of the early twentieth-century insurgent leader Augusto César Sandino. During the Sandinista Revolution of 1979-90, Cardenal, appointed Nicaragua's minister of culture, became one of the most provocative and internationally recognized figures of liberation theology, while Ramírez, a member of the revolutionary junta, and later elected vice-president of Nicaragua, emerged as an authoritative figure for third world nationalism. But before all else, the two were groundbreaking creative writers. Through a close reading of the works by Nicaragua's best-known and most prolific modern authors, Sandino's Nation studies the construction of Nicaraguan national identity during three distinct periods of the country's recent history - before, during, and after the 1979-90 revolution. Stephen Henighan offers rigorous textual analyses of poems, memoirs, essays, and novels, interwoven with a sharply narrated history of Nicaragua. The only comprehensive study of the careers of Cardenal and Ramírez, Sandino's Nation is essential to understanding transformations to both Nicaragua and the role of the writer in Latin America.

In 1996, the Guatemalan civil war ended with the signing of the Peace Accords, facilitated by the United Nations and promoted as a beacon of hope for a country with a history of conflict. Twenty years later, the new era of political protest in Guatemala is highly complex and contradictory: the persistence of colonialism, fraught indigenous-settler relations, political exclusion, corruption, criminal impunity, gendered violence, judicial procedures conducted under threat, entrenched inequality, as well as economic fragility. Human and Environmental Justice in Guatemala examines the complexities of the quest for justice in Guatemala, and the realities of both new forms of resistance and long-standing obstacles to the rule of law in the human and environmental realms. Written by prominent scholars and activists, this book explores high-profile trials, the activities of foreign mining companies, attempts to prosecute war crimes, and cultural responses to injustice in literature, feminist performance art and the media. The challenges to human and environmental capacities for justice are constrained, or facilitated, by factors that shape culture, politics, society, and the economy. The contributors to this volume include Guatemalans such as the human rights activist Helen Mack Chang, the environmental journalist Magalí Rey Rosa, former Guatemalan Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz, as well as widely published Guatemala scholars.

These eleven short stories cover a wide range of territory - from Toronto to Cuba to Eastern Europe. And, wide-ranging over geography as they are, they also cover an array of characters and situations that can only be situated in the twenty-first century.

When Kevin, an Irish Montrealer, attends graduate school at Oxford University in the early 1990s, he meets Leon, a London Jew from a Communist family, and Alex, a Soviet defector’s son raised in Toronto. As the trio begins to form a complex and conflicted friendship, Alex pulls away and spends more of his time tutoring a charming, yet troubled, upper-class undergraduate and less of it with Kevin and Leon. In a fit of jealousy, Kevin and Leon play a prank on Alex and the undergrad, a prank with dire consequences.Ultimately, the three young men go their separate ways, but what happened that night binds them together and helps lead them to freedom and self-discovery in a post-Cold War world.

In this essay collection, Henighan ranges across continents, centuries and linguistic traditions to examine how literary culture and our perception of history are changing as the world grows smaller. He weaves together daring literary criticism with front-line reporting on events such as the end of the Cold War in Poland and African reactions to the G8 Summit.

Miguel Angel Asturias (1899-1974), the first Spanish-American prose writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, is both a pivotal and a representative figure in the development of the twentieth-century Spanish-American novel. Asturias's literary apprenticeship in the Paris of the 1920s and 1930s is arguably the most crucial and least understood period of his career. In forging his definitions of Guatemalan cultural identity and Spanish-American modernity from a French vantage point, Asturias made literary innovations and generated cultural paradoxes which have proved central to subsequent generations of writers. This study of Asturias's early academic writings, journalism and short fiction, and of his first major novel, "El se"or presidente, provides a prehistory of the contemporary Spanish-American novel.

BY THE WINNER OF THE 2013 JOSE SARAMAGO PRIZE AN AFRICA39/UNESCO CITY OF LITERATURE 2014 TOP AFRICAN WRITER UNDER 40 A GUARDIAN TOP FIVE AFRICAN WRITER, 2012 WINNER OF THE GRINZANE PRIZE FOR BEST YOUNG WRITER, 2010 By the beaches of Luanda, the Soviets are building a grand mausoleum in honour of the Comrade President. Granmas are whispering: houses, they say, will be dexploded, and everyone will have to leave. With the help of his friends Charlita and Pi (whom everyone calls 3.14), and with assistance from Dr. Rafael KnockKnock, the Comrade Gas Jockey, the amorous Gudafterov, crazy Sea Foam, and a ghost, our young hero must decide exactly how much trouble he's willing to face to keep his Granma safe in Bishop's Beach. Energetic and colourful, impish and playful, Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret is a charming coming-of-age story from the next rising star in African literature.