The Writings of the National Anthem in Independent Mozambique: Fictions of the Subject-People

This article examines how the writing of the national anthem – taken as an object of a history of post-independence Mozambique – reveals processes of identification concerning the imagining of a subject-people. This involves an analysis of three calls to submit proposals for an anthem and the respon...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Kronos (Bellville, South Africa) South Africa), 2013-01 (39), p.185-203
Main Author: BASTO, MARIA-BENEDITA
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Albinism
Anthems
Communities
Juries
Musicians
National anthems
Poetry
Political parties
Socialism
Writers
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This article examines how the writing of the national anthem – taken as an object of a history of post-independence Mozambique – reveals processes of identification concerning the imagining of a subject-people. This involves an analysis of three calls to submit proposals for an anthem and the responses to such calls, at the eve of independence, in the context of the civil war and the Fourth Congress in the early 1980s, and after the advent of multiparty democracy. While each of these calls was related to a different fiction of the people, all of them shared a common contradiction: the postulate of an active, sovereign people coexisted with the presumption of its passivity, conceived as the inability to produce the anthem which would represent the people’s very self. Thus, rather than confirming the principle of popular sovereignty, the writings of the national anthem led to its problematisation and constitutes an intriguing historiographical object.
ISSN:0259-0190
2309-9585