Magdalena Pfalzgraf

This monograph explores the concept of mobility in Zimbabwean works of fiction published in English between the introduction of the controversial Fast Track Land Reform Programme and the end of the Mugabe era. Since 2000, Zimbabwe has experienced unprecedented levels of transnational out-migration in response to the political conflicts and economic downturn often referred to as the Zimbabwe Crisis. This, in turn, has led to an increased outpouring of literary texts about migration, both in locally produced texts and in works by authors based in the diaspora. Situating Zimbabwe’s recent literary developments in a wider context of Southern African writing and history, this book focuses on texts that portray movement within Zimbabwe’s cities, between village and city, to South Africa, and overseas. The author examines important developments and trends in recent Zimbabwean literature, investigating the link between state authoritarianism and control of mobility, and literature’s potential to intervene into dominant political discourses. The book includes in-depth analyses of ten recent works of fiction published in the post-2000 era and develops mobility as a key category of literary analysis of Zimbabwe’s contemporary literatures. Setting out a rich dialogue between literary criticism and mobility studies, this book will be of interest to researchers of African literature, Southern Africa, migration, and mobility.

Valerie Tagwira’s debut novel The Uncertainty of Hope, set in Harare in 2005, depicts the city on the brink of collapse, characterized by the effects of economic crisis and political violence against the urban poor. Political marginalization of the working classes and gender-based violence intersect and diminish the prospects for the social and spatial mobility of the urban poor. In this article I apply the lens of flânerie to the pedestrian movements of Tagwira’s protagonist Onai Moyo, an impoverished woman who makes a living by selling vegetables on Harare’s streets. In order to make a case for Onai’s ‘flânerie against all odds’, I revisit Walter Benjamin’s theorization as well as recent scholarly engagements with flânerie in non-European settings. By giving her protagonist a gaze traditionally associated with a European middle-class urbanity of the 19th century, Tagwira expands a tradition of city writing/walking and, like other contemporary engagements with flânerie, also breath...

Prof. Dr. Susan Arndt (Universität Bayreuth) Keynote: Transcultural English Studies as Abode for Entangled Literatures Authors are at home in the libraries of the world and their literary creations interlink polydirectionally, thus intertwining nations, languages, discourses and aesthetics. These processes of globalization have been accelerated by increased mobility just as much as latest technological developments and online communication. Being a rhizomic trans_space, literature performs as a transnational storage medium of transcultural life knowledge on the move, as Ottmar Ette puts it. Édouard Glissant bundles the global presence and unpredictable diversity and polyphonic dialogism of “literature with no fixed abode" (Ette) as rhizome in his stratagem "poétique de la relation", featuring a “unity in diversity”. As Glissant reminds us, these processes of accelerated globalisation should not be mistaken as a happy-ever-after “cosmopolitanism” (Beck) bereft of any p...

Valerie Tagwira’s debut novel The Uncertainty of Hope, set in Harare in 2005, depicts the city on the brink of collapse, characterized by the effects of economic crisis and political violence against the urban poor. Political marginalization of the working classes and gender-based violence intersect and diminish the prospects for the social and spatial mobility of the urban poor. In this article I apply the lens of flânerie to the pedestrian movements of Tagwira’s protagonist Onai Moyo, an impoverished woman who makes a living by selling vegetables on Harare’s streets. In order to make a case for Onai’s ‘flânerie against all odds’, I revisit Walter Benjamin’s theorization as well as recent scholarly engagements with flânerie in non-European settings. By giving her protagonist a gaze traditionally associated with a European middle-class urbanity of the 19th century, Tagwira expands a tradition of city writing/walking and, like other contemporary engagements with flânerie, also breath...

Valerie Tagwira’s debut novel The Uncertainty of Hope, set in Harare in 2005, depicts the city on the brink of collapse, characterized by the effects of economic crisis and political violence against the urban poor. Political marginalization of the working classes and gender-based violence intersect and diminish the prospects for the social and spatial mobility of the urban poor. In this article I apply the lens of flânerie to the pedestrian movements of Tagwira’s protagonist Onai Moyo, an impoverished woman who makes a living by selling vegetables on Harare’s streets. In order to make a case for Onai’s ‘flânerie against all odds’, I revisit Walter Benjamin’s theorization as well as recent scholarly engagements with flânerie in non-European settings. By giving her protagonist a gaze traditionally associated with a European middle-class urbanity of the 19th century, Tagwira expands a tradition of city writing/walking and, like other contemporary engagements with flânerie, also breath...

This monograph explores the concept of mobility in Zimbabwean works of fiction published in English between the introduction of the controversial Fast Track Land Reform Programme and the end of the Mugabe era.

Since 2000, Zimbabwe has experienced unprecedented levels of transnational out-migration in response to the political conflicts and economic downturn often referred to as the Zimbabwe Crisis. This, in turn, has led to an increased outpouring of literary texts about migration, both in locally produced texts and in works by authors based in the diaspora. Situating Zimbabwe’s recent literary developments in a wider context of Southern African writing and history, this book focuses on texts that portray movement within Zimbabwe’s cities, between village and city, to South Africa, and overseas. The author examines important developments and trends in recent Zimbabwean literature, investigating the link between state authoritarianism and control of mobility, and literature’s potential to intervene into dominant political discourses. The book includes in-depth analyses of ten recent works of fiction published in the post-2000 era and develops mobility as a key category of literary analysis of Zimbabwe’s contemporary literatures.

Setting out a rich dialogue between literary criticism and mobility studies, this book will be of interest to researchers of African literature, Southern Africa, migration, and mobility.