Escaping the “dark mantle of night”: Amos Tutuola and Mário de Andrade

Abstract

This article examines how Macunaíma, by Mário de Andrade, and the two first novels of Amos Tutuola can be read as a confrontation with the Hegelian construction of the universal subject and its exclusion of colonized peoples. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s critique of necropolitics, we argue that Africans and Amerindians were historically relegated to the condition of the “non-living,” specters placed outside of History. Andrade and Tutuola respond to this erasure through narratives that destabilize Western rationalist logic, privileging unreason, metamorphosis, and spectrality. In both bodies of work, the heroic journey is subverted: there is no reconciliation or triumph, but rather liminal states between life and death that expose colonial violence. The fantastic, far from functioning as escapist allegory, operates as an alternative ontological regime. This reading brings these narratives into proximity with Derridean hauntology, arguing that they reclaim the ethical presence of specters—victims of colonialism and slavery—as a necessary condition for any notion of justice. Thus, Andrade and Tutuola develop poetics that escape the Hegelian “dark mantle of night,” proposing modes of existence that refuse the exclusionary universality of modernity.