Lanie Millar, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese, and Fabienne Moore, associate professor of French, collaborated on a newly published book The Revolution Will Be a Poetic Act: African Culture and Decolonization (Polity, 2024), a translation of essays and speeches by prolific anticolonial writer, poet, and politician Mário Pinto de Andrade.

They will present a Wine Chat on this book and their collaboration on Wednesday, June 4, 2025

Born in Angola during Portuguese colonial rule, Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928–1990) was one Africa’s most important 20th-century intellectuals who wrote in French, Portuguese, and Spanish. In 1956, he founded the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola but was exiled after independence was achieved in 1975. He never returned. 

As anti-colonial movements got underway in the mid-twentieth century, Andrade wrote extensively about the urgent necessity for Africans to turn away from European cultural and political models, arguing that communities emerging from colonization should focus on voices from within, on self-representation, and on horizontal relationships among Black, African, and decolonizing peoples. Andrade played a key role in theorizing the international reach of revolutionary 20th-century poetry and literature, Black cultural vindication, and African liberation.

Millar served as an OHC Faculty Advisory Board member 2021–24 and was a 2021–22 OHC Teaching Fellow and a 2016–17 OHC Ernest G. Moll Research Fellow in Literary Studies. Moore was a 2020–21 OHC Ernest G. Moll Research Fellow in Literary Studies and served as an OHC Faculty Advisory Board member 2015–18.