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White Narratives
The post-2000 period in Zimbabwe saw the launch of a fast track land reform programme, resulting in a flurry of accounts from white Zimbabweans about how they saw the land, the land invasions, and their own sense of belonging and identity. In White Narratives, Irikidzayi Manase engages with this fervent output of texts seeking definition of experiences, conflicts and ambiguities arising from the land invasions. He takes us through his study of texts selected from the memoirs, fictional and non-fictional accounts of white farmers and other displaced white narrators on the post-2000 Zimbabwe land invasions, scrutinising divisions between white and black in terms of both current and historical ideology, society and spatial relationships. He examines how the revisionist politics of the Zimbabwean government influenced the politics of identities and race categories during the period 2000–2008, and posits some solutions to the contestations for land and belonging.
Home and Nation in Anglophone Autobiographies of Africa
This book looks at contemporary autobiographical works by writers with African backgrounds in relation to the idea of ‘place’. It examines eight authors’ works – Helen Cooper’s The House at Sugar Beach, Sisonke Msimang’s Always Another Country, Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage, Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland, Douglas Rogers’s The Last Resort, Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s Son of Elsewhere, Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil’s The Girl Who Smiled Beads and Aminatta Forna’s autobiographical writing – to argue that place is particularly central to personal narrative in texts whose authors have migrated multiple times. Spanning Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Rwanda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, this book interrogates the label ‘African’ writing which has been criticized for ignoring local contexts. It demonstrates how in their works these writers seek to reconnect with a bygone ‘Africa’, often after complex experiences of political upheavals and personal loss. The chapters also provide in-depth analyses of key concepts related to place and autobiography: place and privilege, place and trauma, and the relationship between place and nation.
Cultural Texts of Resistance in Zimbabwe
Cultural Texts of Resistance in Zimbabwe explores how ordinary citizens appropriate and deploy cultural texts such as internet memes, songs, political cartoons and social media discussions as vehicles to contest hegemonic narratives of the state and insert alternative ways of imagining the future of the nation. This book is a timely attempt to examine the multiple and complex dimensions of resistance in post-millennial Zimbabwe through analysing different cultural productions. It centres the voices of ordinary Zimbabweans by examining popular cultural texts that reflect their experiences and ways of living within the Zimbabwean crisis of the post-2000 period. The book argues that subversive cultural texts have become important tools that ordinary citizens appropriate to challenge the repressive political environment and imagine different ways of writing the nation. The book brings a fresh perspective to ongoing discussions on how popular cultural texts contribute to the narration of the nation, especially in the context of crisis.
African Youth Cultures in a Globalized World
All over the world, there is growing concern about the ramifications of globalization, late-modernity and general global social and economic restructuring on the lives and futures of young people. Bringing together a wide body of research to reflect on youth responses to social change in Africa, this volume shows that while young people in the region face extraordinary social challenges in their everyday lives, they also continue to devise unique ways to reinvent their difficult circumstances and prosper in the midst of seismic global and local social changes. Contributors from Africa and around the world cover a wide range of topics on African youth cultures, exploring the lives of young people not necessarily as victims, but as active social players in the face of a shifting, late-modernist civilization. With empirical cases and varied theoretical approaches, the book offers a timely scholarly contribution to debates around globalization and its implications and impacts for Africa's youth.
Contested Communities
This interdisciplinary volume investigates com-munity in postcolonial language situations, texts, and media. In actual and imagined communities, membership assumes shared features – values, linguistic codes, geographical origin, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, professional interests and practices. How is membership in such communities constructed, manifested, tested or contested? What new forms have emerged in the wake of globalization, translocation, and digital media? Contributions in linguistic, literary, and cultural studies explore the role of communication, narratives, memory, and trauma in processes of (un)belonging. One section treats communication and the speech community....
The Zimdancehall Revolution
Zimdancehall is a musical movement in Zimbabwe that has grown significantly since 2010. The Zimdancehall Revolution brings together critical essays on various aspects of Zimdancehall culture by scholars from diverse disciplines. Traditionally, music critics and senior academics have not taken Zimdancehall seriously, regarding it as vulgar, transient, bubble gum, lacking depth, and in short, a fad. There were also allegations that the lyrics influenced factionalism, incited violence and glorified drug use and unbridled promiscuity among the youth. This book affords this movement the protracted intellectual engagement that it deserves and argues that Zimdancehall is more than just a musical ge...
Mobilities, Literature, Culture
This is the first book dedicated to literary and cultural scholars’ engagement with mobilities scholarship. As such, the volume both advances new theoretical approaches to the study of culture and furthers the recent “humanities turn” in mobilities studies. The book’s scholarship is deeply informed by cultural geography’s vision of a mobilised reconceptualisation of space and place, but also by the contribution of literary scholars in articulating questions of travel, technologies of transport, (post)colonialism and migration through a close engagement with textual materials. A comprehensive introduction maps pre-histories and emerging directions of this exciting interdisciplinary endeavor while taking up the theoretical and methodological challenges of the burgeoning subfield. Contributions range across geographical and disciplinary boundaries to address questions of embodied subjectivities, mobility and the nation, geopolitics of migration, and mobilities futures.
The Worlding of the South African Novel
The Worlding of the South African Novel develops from something of a paradox: that despite momentous political transition from apartheid to democracy, little in South Africa’s socio-economic reality has actually changed. Poyner discusses how the contemporary South African novel engages with this reality. In forms of literary experiment, the novels open up intellectual spaces shaping or contesting the idea of the “new South Africa”. The mediatising of truth at the TRC hearings, how best to deal with a spectacular yet covert past, the shaping for “unimagined communities” of an inclusive public sphere, HIV/AIDS as the preeminent site testing capitalist modernity, white anxieties about land reform, disease as environmental injustice and the fostering of an enabling restorative cultural memory: Poyner argues that through these key nodes of intellectual thought, the novels speak to recent debates on world-literature to register the “shock” of an uneven modernity produced by a capitalist world economy.
Old Age in African Literary and Cultural Contexts
Through a wide range of indigenous, postcolonial, gender and racial lenses, African writers have provided perspectives on various aspects of old age in the context of African literatures and cultures. This book illustrates how African literary and linguistic representations, ranging from short stories, novels and film to drama and theatre, give expression to ideas about old age. The perspectives offered here provide essential knowledge in understanding the uses of dichotomous age-related categories, such as old-young, elderly male-elderly female, and foreign-indigenous, which generally result in prejudice. Using ageism as its central theme, the contributions draw attention to the ambiguity a...
Anxious Joburg
An interdisciplinary account of the life of Johannesburg, South Africa's "global south city" Anxious Joburg focuses on Johannesburg, the largest and wealthiest city in South Africa, as a case study for the contemporary global South city. Global South cities are often characterised as sites of contradiction and difference that produce a range of feelings around anxiety. This is often imagined in terms of the global North’s anxieties about the South: migration, crime, terrorism, disease and environmental crisis. Anxious Joburg invites readers to consider an intimate perspective of living inside such a city. How does it feel to live in the metropolis of Johannesburg: what are the conditions, ...
