Mário Pinto de Andrade’s Cultural Politics Beyond Negritude

Abstract Mário Pinto de Andrade is best known as the primary editor and anthologizer of Lusophone Negritude poetry in the 1950s and 1960s. However, Andrade also theorized how the armed struggle for independence and the ongoing process of decolonization transformed culture. This lesser-known archive of Andrade’s writings on cultural production from the late 1960s to 1980s is key to understanding his role as an architect of Lusophone African culture. This article traces his contributions to systematizing African literature in Portuguese produced during and after decolonization. It argues that Andrade understood political and cultural decolonization as two aspects of the same process.