Violence has, in history, pervasively attended processes, events and ideas of making and unmaking... more Violence has, in history, pervasively attended processes, events and ideas of making and unmaking modern nation-states, more so in previously colonised societies where colonialism manifested as brute and psychic violence, and revolutionary wars of liberation became rites and routes of passages to liberation. Theorizing the physical but mainly mental processes of traversing such routes in his chapter "Concerning Violence" in The Wretched of the Earth (1963), the Martinique-born liberation psychiatrist Franz Fanon famously noted that decolonization is inherently a physically and psychologically violent phenomenon. Born out of violent forces in violent conditions by violent paternalists, the post-colonial nation is inevitably entangled in precarious cycles of violence with complex roots in pre-colonial and colonial violence. The violence as well as its memory palimpsests evolutionary trajectories of becoming and being postcolonial. Creative literature has long functioned as a fascinatingly complex site from which to encounter the many dimensions and dynamics of violence in Zimbabwe. The literary archive of violence multiplies lenses into the violence and how it occurs as a performed and experienced rite of nation-ness. Using purposefully selected scenes of pre-colonial and colonial violence from several Zimbabwean literary texts, this chapter explores their representations of violence, focusing on what they tell us about its immanence in the historical evolution of group identities and relations. Borrowing from Fanon's insights on the psychology, materiality and race of violence, the chapter centres violence as a temporal motif and concept that is fundamentally rhizomic in the social and political ordering of societies, branching out into many different leads that unravel its 'necessity', causes, forms, and nature.
This chapter uses onomastic lenses to read the metanarrative of selected literary titles in the Z... more This chapter uses onomastic lenses to read the metanarrative of selected literary titles in the Zimbabwean literary oeuvre.
This chapter situates names and naming practices in Southern Africa in a postcolonial context, th... more This chapter situates names and naming practices in Southern Africa in a postcolonial context, theorizing the ways that they can potentially reflect and reflect on the social, politics and economics of postcolonial southern African societies.
The post-2000 Zimbabwean crisis demonstrates the tendencies and potential in the past to influenc... more The post-2000 Zimbabwean crisis demonstrates the tendencies and potential in the past to influence the politics of the present. What is widely referred to as the Third Chimurenga (the third liberation struggle) in this crisis epoch is a complex (and at times problematic) cache of nationalist and quasi-nationalist ideologies, philosophies and practices, which are not only connected to the first two Chimurengas through their aspiration for a totally decolonised nation, but also the demand for its political guardianship by the heroes of the armed Second Chimurenga. Many writers have grappled with the hegemonic tendencies of what is now referred to as ‘patriotic history’ (a form of politicised, state-circumscribed history of the nation) without seriously engaging with the deeper crevices of its nature. This paper sets out to argue that in post-2000 Zimbabwean politics, the past and the present are also connected through names and naming patterns that straddle the three Chimurengas with ...
Post-2000 Zimbabwean literature in English demonstrates an unprecedented fascination with the chi... more Post-2000 Zimbabwean literature in English demonstrates an unprecedented fascination with the child narrator. While there is some precedence for the use of child narrators or narratives that focus on child experiences to grapple with sociopolitical issues, the wide extent to which this style has been used post-2000 is unparalleled. The post-2000 socioeconomic crisis in Zimbabwe has clear victims; however, owing to the intensely polarized perspectives on its origins and nature, the identity of the victimizers is not so clear and is in fact hotly contested and politicized. As typical and “known” victims, their victimization can furtively reveal and reflect on their victimizers and in the process subtly expose them for knowing. This form of “knowing” transcends a mere discernment of the victimizers’ physical identities; it goes to the heart of their motives, apparent and subterranean political objectives, and means of attaining them. Victim child characters are often used symbolically ...
ABSTRACT This article explores the complex semantic yet political function of nicknames of Zimbab... more ABSTRACT This article explores the complex semantic yet political function of nicknames of Zimbabwe’s national football teams (‘Warriors’ and ‘Mighty Warriors’) to point towards the possibilities they provide for theorising the political (ab)use of the warrior identity in hegemonic (re)constructions of national identity. Unarguably the most popular sport in Zimbabwe, football has become a potential site for the political (re)inscription of national identities. The article explores how national team nicknames ‘Warriors’ and ‘Mighty Warriors’ have been invoked in ruling party discourses to (re)create a national warrior identity that serves the state’s hegemonic intentions inter alia by disqualifying its opponents from power.
Perhaps nowhere else in southern Africa has liberation war memories had such a stranglehold on po... more Perhaps nowhere else in southern Africa has liberation war memories had such a stranglehold on political developments than in Zimbabwe post 2000. In this period, the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) devised and operationalized the Third Chimurenga—a cache of anti-colonial, anti-West, and anti-opposition narratives that essentially re-constructs political power as inextricably bound up with the liberation struggle, for long an exclusive site of the party’s claims to political legitimacy. The Third Chimurenga often manifested in the form of political rhetoric by political leaders and reinforced by an array of cultural performances such as song and other forms of spectacular dramaturgy such as national commemorations. The literary text is the latest participant in the Third Chimurenga politics and aesthetics. In this article, I read Mashingaidze Gomo’s novel A Fine Madness as a Third Chimurenga literary narrative, centering on how its representations of ...
In Zimbabwe, as in most traditionally conservative, patriarchal and Christian dominated countries... more In Zimbabwe, as in most traditionally conservative, patriarchal and Christian dominated countries, female sex work is abhorred on moral grounds as an unbecoming means of livelihood which takes away the practising woman’s social respectability. In such societies, then, the moral threat and stigma associated with female sex work affect women’s decisions on whether or not to take up sex work as a permanent means of livelihood. One can, however, ask how sustainable and stable these patriarchally constructed notions of morality and female identity are, especially in the face of crises? This article uses Virginia Phiri’s novel Highway queen, which is set in one of Zimbabwe’s economically tumultuous eras, to demonstrate how cultural texts grapple with the discourse of female sex work in contemporary Zimbabwe. The gist of my argument is that dominant prostitute identity constructs shaped by Zimbabwe’s patriarchal social and economic system are unstable. I find that the novel Highway queen m...
In Zimbabwe (like in most post-colonial African nations), history holds a critical place in disco... more In Zimbabwe (like in most post-colonial African nations), history holds a critical place in discourses on constructions and reconstructions of national identity. The history of the Gukurahundi (the massacre of civilians in Matabeleland and Midlands regions of Zimbabwe in the early to late 1980s) continues to dominate debates on the politics of ethnic exclusion in contemporary Zimbabwe. This article explores the place of creative fiction in this political discourse. The article contends that Yvonne Vera’s novel The Stone Virgins (which is set in the Gukurahundi era) is a historically situated narrative of murder, rape, and trauma that powerfully challenges and renegotiates state power premised on hegemonic inscriptions and re-inscriptions of national history. The article focuses on the subtlety with which the psychic impact of rape and violence, especially as manifested in the suppression of the female victim’s voice and memory, can be read in turn (and paradoxically so) as the novel...
Writing the postcolonial Nation: A study of three Zimbabwean literary texts explores the interpla... more Writing the postcolonial Nation: A study of three Zimbabwean literary texts explores the interplay of history, postcolonial theories and contemporary Zimbabwean literature with particular reference to three literary works published in the post year 2000 period - Olley Maruma''s Coming Home, Shimmer Chinodya''s Chairman of Fools and Chenjerai Hove''s poems in Blind Moon. The Zimbabwean cultural, economic and political spheres have been contentious and prone to polarized and politicized representations. In a tumultuous political context, the struggle for the control of minds takes center- stage as the diametrically opposed major political parties trade blame for the dystopian contemporary time-space. This book invokes multifarious voices on the obtaining "Zimbabwean crisis" in its critique of the social and political function of the contemporary Zimbabwean literary narrative. The book studies the various ways in which literary works complexly further ...
Violence has, in history, pervasively attended processes, events and ideas of making and unmaking... more Violence has, in history, pervasively attended processes, events and ideas of making and unmaking modern nation-states, more so in previously colonised societies where colonialism manifested as brute and psychic violence, and revolutionary wars of liberation became rites and routes of passages to liberation. Theorizing the physical but mainly mental processes of traversing such routes in his chapter "Concerning Violence" in The Wretched of the Earth (1963), the Martinique-born liberation psychiatrist Franz Fanon famously noted that decolonization is inherently a physically and psychologically violent phenomenon. Born out of violent forces in violent conditions by violent paternalists, the post-colonial nation is inevitably entangled in precarious cycles of violence with complex roots in pre-colonial and colonial violence. The violence as well as its memory palimpsests evolutionary trajectories of becoming and being postcolonial. Creative literature has long functioned as a fascinatingly complex site from which to encounter the many dimensions and dynamics of violence in Zimbabwe. The literary archive of violence multiplies lenses into the violence and how it occurs as a performed and experienced rite of nation-ness. Using purposefully selected scenes of pre-colonial and colonial violence from several Zimbabwean literary texts, this chapter explores their representations of violence, focusing on what they tell us about its immanence in the historical evolution of group identities and relations. Borrowing from Fanon's insights on the psychology, materiality and race of violence, the chapter centres violence as a temporal motif and concept that is fundamentally rhizomic in the social and political ordering of societies, branching out into many different leads that unravel its 'necessity', causes, forms, and nature.
This chapter uses onomastic lenses to read the metanarrative of selected literary titles in the Z... more This chapter uses onomastic lenses to read the metanarrative of selected literary titles in the Zimbabwean literary oeuvre.
This chapter situates names and naming practices in Southern Africa in a postcolonial context, th... more This chapter situates names and naming practices in Southern Africa in a postcolonial context, theorizing the ways that they can potentially reflect and reflect on the social, politics and economics of postcolonial southern African societies.
The post-2000 Zimbabwean crisis demonstrates the tendencies and potential in the past to influenc... more The post-2000 Zimbabwean crisis demonstrates the tendencies and potential in the past to influence the politics of the present. What is widely referred to as the Third Chimurenga (the third liberation struggle) in this crisis epoch is a complex (and at times problematic) cache of nationalist and quasi-nationalist ideologies, philosophies and practices, which are not only connected to the first two Chimurengas through their aspiration for a totally decolonised nation, but also the demand for its political guardianship by the heroes of the armed Second Chimurenga. Many writers have grappled with the hegemonic tendencies of what is now referred to as ‘patriotic history’ (a form of politicised, state-circumscribed history of the nation) without seriously engaging with the deeper crevices of its nature. This paper sets out to argue that in post-2000 Zimbabwean politics, the past and the present are also connected through names and naming patterns that straddle the three Chimurengas with ...
Post-2000 Zimbabwean literature in English demonstrates an unprecedented fascination with the chi... more Post-2000 Zimbabwean literature in English demonstrates an unprecedented fascination with the child narrator. While there is some precedence for the use of child narrators or narratives that focus on child experiences to grapple with sociopolitical issues, the wide extent to which this style has been used post-2000 is unparalleled. The post-2000 socioeconomic crisis in Zimbabwe has clear victims; however, owing to the intensely polarized perspectives on its origins and nature, the identity of the victimizers is not so clear and is in fact hotly contested and politicized. As typical and “known” victims, their victimization can furtively reveal and reflect on their victimizers and in the process subtly expose them for knowing. This form of “knowing” transcends a mere discernment of the victimizers’ physical identities; it goes to the heart of their motives, apparent and subterranean political objectives, and means of attaining them. Victim child characters are often used symbolically ...
ABSTRACT This article explores the complex semantic yet political function of nicknames of Zimbab... more ABSTRACT This article explores the complex semantic yet political function of nicknames of Zimbabwe’s national football teams (‘Warriors’ and ‘Mighty Warriors’) to point towards the possibilities they provide for theorising the political (ab)use of the warrior identity in hegemonic (re)constructions of national identity. Unarguably the most popular sport in Zimbabwe, football has become a potential site for the political (re)inscription of national identities. The article explores how national team nicknames ‘Warriors’ and ‘Mighty Warriors’ have been invoked in ruling party discourses to (re)create a national warrior identity that serves the state’s hegemonic intentions inter alia by disqualifying its opponents from power.
Perhaps nowhere else in southern Africa has liberation war memories had such a stranglehold on po... more Perhaps nowhere else in southern Africa has liberation war memories had such a stranglehold on political developments than in Zimbabwe post 2000. In this period, the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) devised and operationalized the Third Chimurenga—a cache of anti-colonial, anti-West, and anti-opposition narratives that essentially re-constructs political power as inextricably bound up with the liberation struggle, for long an exclusive site of the party’s claims to political legitimacy. The Third Chimurenga often manifested in the form of political rhetoric by political leaders and reinforced by an array of cultural performances such as song and other forms of spectacular dramaturgy such as national commemorations. The literary text is the latest participant in the Third Chimurenga politics and aesthetics. In this article, I read Mashingaidze Gomo’s novel A Fine Madness as a Third Chimurenga literary narrative, centering on how its representations of ...
In Zimbabwe, as in most traditionally conservative, patriarchal and Christian dominated countries... more In Zimbabwe, as in most traditionally conservative, patriarchal and Christian dominated countries, female sex work is abhorred on moral grounds as an unbecoming means of livelihood which takes away the practising woman’s social respectability. In such societies, then, the moral threat and stigma associated with female sex work affect women’s decisions on whether or not to take up sex work as a permanent means of livelihood. One can, however, ask how sustainable and stable these patriarchally constructed notions of morality and female identity are, especially in the face of crises? This article uses Virginia Phiri’s novel Highway queen, which is set in one of Zimbabwe’s economically tumultuous eras, to demonstrate how cultural texts grapple with the discourse of female sex work in contemporary Zimbabwe. The gist of my argument is that dominant prostitute identity constructs shaped by Zimbabwe’s patriarchal social and economic system are unstable. I find that the novel Highway queen m...
In Zimbabwe (like in most post-colonial African nations), history holds a critical place in disco... more In Zimbabwe (like in most post-colonial African nations), history holds a critical place in discourses on constructions and reconstructions of national identity. The history of the Gukurahundi (the massacre of civilians in Matabeleland and Midlands regions of Zimbabwe in the early to late 1980s) continues to dominate debates on the politics of ethnic exclusion in contemporary Zimbabwe. This article explores the place of creative fiction in this political discourse. The article contends that Yvonne Vera’s novel The Stone Virgins (which is set in the Gukurahundi era) is a historically situated narrative of murder, rape, and trauma that powerfully challenges and renegotiates state power premised on hegemonic inscriptions and re-inscriptions of national history. The article focuses on the subtlety with which the psychic impact of rape and violence, especially as manifested in the suppression of the female victim’s voice and memory, can be read in turn (and paradoxically so) as the novel...
Writing the postcolonial Nation: A study of three Zimbabwean literary texts explores the interpla... more Writing the postcolonial Nation: A study of three Zimbabwean literary texts explores the interplay of history, postcolonial theories and contemporary Zimbabwean literature with particular reference to three literary works published in the post year 2000 period - Olley Maruma''s Coming Home, Shimmer Chinodya''s Chairman of Fools and Chenjerai Hove''s poems in Blind Moon. The Zimbabwean cultural, economic and political spheres have been contentious and prone to polarized and politicized representations. In a tumultuous political context, the struggle for the control of minds takes center- stage as the diametrically opposed major political parties trade blame for the dystopian contemporary time-space. This book invokes multifarious voices on the obtaining "Zimbabwean crisis" in its critique of the social and political function of the contemporary Zimbabwean literary narrative. The book studies the various ways in which literary works complexly further ...
ii OPSOMMING iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 2: ALTERNATIVE METAPHORS OF... more ii OPSOMMING iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 2: ALTERNATIVE METAPHORS OF A HISTORICAL MOMENT 40 CHAPTER 3: THE CONTROVERSY OF NATIONAL INTEREST‘ 68 CHAPTER 4: ―A STRUGGLE WITHIN A STRUGGLE‖: CENTERING FEMALE PERSPECTIVES ON THE ZIMBABWEAN CRISIS. 110 CHAPTER 5: HOLDING THE STATE TO ACCOUNT IN POST-2000 ZIMBABWEAN FICTION 163 CONCLUSION: CONTESTED NARRATIVES OF THE ZIMBABWEAN CRISIS ......... 211 WORKS CITED 231 Stellenbosch University http://scholar.sun.ac.za
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