The Archive Fever. The “Benjamin effect” and the Angolan revolutions

Abstract

In this article I discuss the importance of the “archive” in the con- text of the current political struggles which are happening in Angola. Departing from Jacques Derrida’s notion of mal d’archive, I argue that the current political dialectic produces a distinction between hegemonic and subaltern archives, which exist in confron- tation with one another. Analyzing the subaltern archive of the so-called Revú movement, I will describe the processes through which it creates an alternative epistemology to the official narrati- ve of the Angolan government.