António Quadros and the Future

Abstract This chapter discusses the knotty relationship between António Quadros and posterity as he frames it in the literary works that he published under three pennames. Quadros’s anxieties over how posterity will respond to his works reflect the reality that many authors writing in Mozambique rely on international or, in Quadros’s case, speculative future audiences for recognition. The author situates Quadros’s framing of the uncertain place of his literary works in the Mozambican canon within the broader context of Mozambican letters. He relates Quadros’s relationship to posterity to his analysis in previous chapters of Quadros’s elusive authorial strategies, focusing, in particular, on Quadros’s continuing to publish cryptic poetry even after the end of colonial censorship.