Suchergebnisse

In Zimbabwe's past decade characterised by unprecedented political tensions and ideological ambiguities, creative literature has emerged as a fruitful site to encounter discourses and counter-discourses for and against the state-authored narrative of land and its political significance. While there are literary texts that collaborate with state notions of the land and its significance to contemporary political and economic urgencies, there is a growing canon of imaginative literature that questions the idea and praxis of the government's post-2000 land reforms. I use Lawrence Hoba's short stories in his collection The Trek and Other Stories to argue that alongside the (consciously and to some extent unconsciously) pro-land-reform literary works, there are texts possibly classifiable as anti-establishment vis-a-vis their treatment of the land issue. The focus is on the short stories' potential to subtly engender alternative conceptions of the post-2000 land reforms to that offered by the state's grand narrative of land.

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 the post-2000 political and economic crisis relates to the underlying counter-discourse of the empirical Third Chimurenga. This article dialogues with the nature of the connection between Gomo's novel and the empirical Third Chimurenga. This reading reveals how the literary text exploits the affective and aesthetic dimensions of creative art to portray a vivid picture of the Third Chimurenga, which can move the reader to a new consciousness of issues around Zimbabwe's liberation struggle and the contemporary land politics.

"This book examines the ways in which political discourses of 'newness' are (re)produced, circulated, naturalised, received and contested in Post-Mugabe Zimbabwe. Going beyond the ordinariness of conventional political science methods and theories, the book offers new, engaging and multi-disciplinary approaches that treat discourse and language as important sites to encounter the politics of contested representations and framings of the worsening crisis in Zimbabwe in the context of the 2017 Zimbabwean transition and the new leadership's legitimacy debacle. The book centres discourse in new approaches to contestations around representations and meanings of various aspects of the socio-economic and political crisis in the wake of the 2017 leadership changes. Chapter contributions will examine some of the ways in which language functions as a discursive mechanism for creating imaginaries, circulating, defending and contesting conceptions, visions, perceptions and knowledges of the post-Mugabe turn in the crisis and its management by the government. This book will be of interest to scholars of African Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Language/Discourse Studies, African politics and culture"--

The Postcolonial Condition of Names and Naming Practices in Southern Africa represents a milestone in southern African onomastic studies. The contributors here are all members of, and speakers of, the cultures and languages they write about, and, together, they speak with an authentic African voice on naming issues in the southern part of the African continent. The volume's overarching thesis is that names are important yet often underestimated socio-politico-cultural sites on which some of the most significant events and processes in the post-colony can be read. The onomastic topics covered in the book range from the names of traditional healers and male aphrodisiacs to urban landscapes and street naming, from the interface between Chinese and African naming practices to the names of bands of musicians and mini-bus taxis. There is a strong section on literary onomastics which explores how names have been variously deployed by southern African fiction writers for certain semantic, aesthetic and ideological effects. The cultures and languages covered in this volume are equally wide-ranging, and, while some authors focus on single languages and cultures (for example Thembu, Xhosa, Shona), others look at inter-cultural influences such as the influence of the Portuguese and Chinese languages on Shona naming.Written by Professor Adrian KoopmanEmeritus Professor, University of KwaZulu-Natal

Postcolonial environmentalism in Africa explores interactions between humans and nature in the context of intensifying ecological violence in the aftermath of formal colonialism and its trademark violence of extractive power. As a critical approach that stresses the influence of colonial remains in everyday socio-political processes and relations, postcolonial environmentalism has been widely deployed to examine the interconnected relationship between the environment, materiality, and humans, with a focus on how one impacts and define the others. This study invokes, in a broad sense, African postcolonial ecocriticism to explore how creative literature is being used as a strategy of negotiating ecological violence in the era of global multi-national corporatism. The study adopts Grosfoguel's idea of global coloniality as a conceptual framework to examine how Imbolo Mbue's novel How Beautiful We Were (2021) portrays a Cameroonian postcolony where transnational corporations and corrupt governments perpetuate colonial machineries of extraction, ecological devastation, improvisation, dehumanization and violence. The article argues that Mbue symbolically uses decolonial environmental motifs to illustrate what is lost when symbiotic bonds between communal African societies and their natural environments are sacrificed for corporate profits that leave exploitation, environmental degradation and moral debauchery in their trails.