The Surplus Historicity of a Discarded Army Boot: Mia Couto, Political Violence, and the “Withering Away” of the Postcolonial Nation-State

Proposing that the concept of history grounding Mozambique's national project negates historicity itself, Mia Couto suggests in his fiction that the collapse of nationalism after independence was inherent to the reduction of the promise of liberation to a teleological design. His narratives thus chronicle local dreams of community incommensurable with nation and empire.