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In this study, I reread George Orwell’s remarkable text Animal Farm together with Noviolet Bulawayo’s second novel, titled Glory. Orwell’s allegoric novel remains astute in its account of the fate of living under the shadow of an autocratic state whose leadership is haunted by the paranoia of losing power. Orwell deploys symbolic animals, including dogs, hens, pigs, horses, sheep and donkeys, to function as salient embodiments permeated with figurative meanings about a corrupt regime which lashes out at its victims. I deploy Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of bare life, homo sacer, state of exception and suspension of law in reading the Zimbabwe electoral politics and biopolitical imaginings of the postcolonial state. I foreground contemporary power mechanisms, unruly manifestation and performativity on the body and mind of the homo sacer(s). I also interrogate the Napoleon forms of power exercised by state ‘security agents’ – renamed growling dogs and defenders in modern Zimbabwe. I conclude that biopolitical power, in an environment where the exception has become the rule, serves in the management of perturbed citizens. Contribution: Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical conceptual framework has rarely been used to examine the intricate and often paradoxical relations between those in power (rulers) and ordinary citizens (the ruled) in present-day Zimbabwe. This study brings to attention spectacles of power, the fate of homo sacer figures and their conviviality – as central tropes complexly enunciated and thematised in both Orwell and Bulawayo’s fictional writings. The parallel analyses of the two novels from different historical periods and literary traditions in this study offer fresh reflections on the complexities that arise from living under autocratic rule.

The primary aim of this article is to think through how silence can be considered as generating meaning in literary prose. For this purpose, the article focuses on Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera's last novel, The Stone Virgins (2002a), which has often been described as 'breaking the silence' about the genocidal violence remembered as Gukurahundi. As a secondary aim, the article sets out to rethink Vera's idea and argues that rather than 'breaking' the silence, her novel explores different forms of silence, some of which are necessary for healing and regeneration. However, silence is not just a theme or motif in the novel: Vera also uses silence in her own writing to generate new meaning. Using an essay by Elleke Boehmer as a point of departure, this article proposes a conceptualisation of silence through two terms: the unsayable and the unsaid, where the former refers to meaning that is suppressed and the latter to that which has not yet been said. It argues that the novel presents a poetics that aligns with its theme of meaning, generative silence, which uses opaque and imprecise syntax and referentiality in a way that maximises the possibility of the unsaid to be said. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, I reread George Orwell's remarkable text Animal Farm together with Noviolet Bulawayo's second novel, titled Glory. Orwell's allegoric novel remains astute in its account of the fate of living under the shadow of an autocratic state whose leadership is haunted by the paranoia of losing power. Orwell deploys symbolic animals, including dogs, hens, pigs, horses, sheep and donkeys, to function as salient embodiments permeated with figurative meanings about a corrupt regime which lashes out at its victims. I deploy Giorgio Agamben's concepts of bare life, homo sacer , state of exception and suspension of law in reading the Zimbabwe electoral politics and biopolitical imaginings of the postcolonial state. I foreground contemporary power mechanisms, unruly manifestation and performativity on the body and mind of the homo sacer(s). I also interrogate the Napoleon forms of power exercised by state 'security agents' – renamed growling dogs and defenders in modern Zimbabwe. I conclude that biopolitical power, in an environment where the exception has become the rule, serves in the management of perturbed citizens. Contribution: Giorgio Agamben's biopolitical conceptual framework has rarely been used to examine the intricate and often paradoxical relations between those in power (rulers) and ordinary citizens (the ruled) in present-day Zimbabwe. This study brings to attention spectacles of power, the fate of homo sacer figures and their conviviality – as central tropes complexly enunciated and thematised in both Orwell and Bulawayo's fictional writings. The parallel analyses of the two novels from different historical periods and literary traditions in this study offer fresh reflections on the complexities that arise from living under autocratic rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Representations of Zimbabwean migrants to South Africa, in scholarship as well as the media, have tended to focus on the often spectacular violence experienced by these migrants. Southern African literary criticism, too, has often privileged the visual, the ocular, and the spectacle. In this article, I focus on a different sensory dimension: the literary representation of sound. I show how sound and soundscapes, as represented in selected literary works, can illuminate everyday aspects of migratory experiences. I focus on aurality, arguing that listening provides a new methodology for reading and interpreting migrant fiction about the lived experiences of Black Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa. Building on theories of the soundscape, I examine how literary representations of migrant listening practices are deployed to comment on lived experiences, and how migrant literary characters' encounters with other migrants illuminate the layered dimensions of forced migration. I argue that a sound-focused analysis of literary works, rather than a focus on the representation of visual spectacle and description, can give readers access to the sense of rootlessness experienced by migrants. Such an aural approach demonstrates that literary and creative works are useful archives of subverted and denied claims of belonging premised on ancestry and geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines intertextuality in Shimmer Chinodya's Chairman of Fools (Harare: Weaver Press, 2005), focusing on the novel's entanglement with earlier texts and its extra-literary context. It argues that the text exhibits generic, stylistic, and thematic entanglements with its precursor texts, particularly Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (Harare: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1988) and Dambudzo Marechera's Mindblast, or, the Definitive Buddy (Harare: College Press, 1984), and with the post-2000 Zimbabwean context, in ways that enrich and extend current and earlier understandings of these texts. It establishes that, besides generic and stylistic entanglements, Chairman of Fools dialogues with these precursor texts in the representation of the figure of the non-conformist artist, discourses of gender, and discourses of mental breakdown. It also engages with discourses of the post-2000 Zimbabwean crisis, inclusive of the "crisis of masculinity". The symbiosis of this intertextuality makes visible the non-hierarchical relationships that exist amongst these related texts, both literary and non-literary, and brings into focus the instability and permeability of the boundaries often used to order and create demarcations within and between these texts. The intertextuality also points at some of the literary continuities and discontinuities in the Zimbabwean literary canon—and hence its evolution—together with social and ideological shifts in Zimbabwean society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is a growing interest in Zimbabwean literature about diasporic experiences in the UK and the USA, scholarship on literary engagements with the Zimbabwean diaspora in South Africa remains sparse. This article analyses clandestine migration from Zimbabwe to South Africa and the formation of a precarious diaspora in the host country as represented in Sue Nyathi's 2018 novel The Gold-Diggers. In contrast to strategies seen in South-North migration writing, those adopted by Nyathi's migrants and diasporic subjects to negotiate everyday challenges – such as the need to pass as South African – reflect the close historical and cultural ties that structure African borderlands. Nyathi's polyvocal text reconfigures diaspora discourse in relation to class and community, drawing attention to migrant vulnerability while illustrating strategies of resistance through identity erasure and homemaking. It carves out a space for precarious, yet not wholly disempowering, intra-African migratory and diasporic experiences often elided in diaspora studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the paradox of repression, dissent and censorship in Zimbabwe. It interrogates how selected literary artists in Zimbabwe have negotiated repression and censorship via choices of genre, codes, themes and publishing strategy. Given the internet-enabled diversification of publishing platforms, it is argued that alternative literary forms have emerged on social media, and, by refusing to be overtly political, some of the literature constitutes a new aesthetics that dissents without appearing to do so and compels us to rethink political action. The article demonstrates how state censorship appears to be contingent upon genre choices made by artists, potential size of audience, and fear that the supposed political harmony that the regime presides over is under threat. It concludes that cyber platforms have overturned traditional conceptions of literary genres and complicated the ability of the state to censor literary production. Ironically though, cyber platforms have also morphed into sites of repression. It is further concluded that censorship has often mobilised outrage in Zimbabwe's cyber citizens, thus paradoxically creating symbolic resistance and infinite opportunities for discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zimbabwe has an extensive censorship infrastructure that operates both formally, through the board of censors, and informally, through intimidation by the police and other state and civil players. The use and misuse of censorship legislation in the country has made for a chaotic situation in which misinterpretations of the law have been widely used to justify police crackdowns, arrests and destruction of art, literature and other cultural forms. This article reads censorship as a multiple and sometimes inconsistent phenomenon that shapes the strategies of cultural producers in manifold ways in Zimbabwe. Different literary and cultural forms constitute varying degrees of threat to the state, the police or individuals, depending on the audiences they address. I wish to explore how literary and cultural forms adapt to very localised practices of censorship. Interpreting the shifting forms, genres and modalities that literature and culture take as part of their strategy to avoid censorship provides new understandings of how literature and culture records social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 breathes new life into a concept often pronounced inappropriate or unproductive for readings of non-European literature.

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 breathes new life into a concept often pronounced inappropriate or unproductive for readings of non-European literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a simple qualitative approach based on library desk study, this article explores Tagwira's The Uncertainty of Hope (2006), Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (2004) and She No Longer Weeps (1996) to ascertain if traditional norms and practices that oppress women are evident in these selected works of art. Further, the article analyses the literary works to unpack the reasons for the abuse of women and to explore why women tolerate abusive relationships instead of freeing themselves from such dehumanising scenarios. Finally, the article interrogates any possibilities available in helping abused women to free themselves from abuse. The analysis of the selected texts was conducted from the perspective of marginality. From the study of the chosen texts, the article establishes that women experience different forms of abuse yet stay in the abusive relationships for reasons which include the protection of patriarchal value systems, the fear of rejection by society, financial dependence and for their love of their children among others. It also emerged from this investigation that women need to be empowered through education and entrepreneurial skills in order to be self-sufficient so that they can leave abusive relationships and provide for their own well-being. The article also argues that the way men and women are socialised should also change and there is need for robust re-orientation across the social divide about gender equality and sensitivity. The conclusion the article makes is that women continue to stay in abusive relationships because of patriarchal values, norms and practices which see women as marginalised beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the form of the Bildungsroman reflect the drive to decolonisation? If the world or postcolonial Bildungsroman is concerned with figuring the development of human personality (as Joseph Slaughter has argued), it is at one and the same time concerned with the allegorisation of national development. Yet, the political exigencies that urge on the writing of decolonisation can equally be served by realism. Perhaps the paradigmatic postcolonial Bildungsroman, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions is also notable for the tension it presents between realism and allegory. This article makes an intervention in the politics of such formalist debates within the Bildungsroman as the tension between allegory and realism or the temporality of its narration in order to gauge their relation to decolonisation. In so doing, it examines Dangarembga's Tambudzai trilogy—including the two sequels The Book of Not and This Mournable Body—and its intertexts, such as the work of Frantz Fanon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines the motifs of genocide and violence in Zimbabwean literature. For more articulation of ideas, it intersects both preoccupations of genocide and gender violence in the Zimbabwean ideological purview, particularly in selected poetry. The paper probes into disarm sensitivity the domain of genocide and violence as universal phenomena and underscores various levels of vitriolic and diatribe people sometimes face in their interactions in a society that is polarized by racial and ethnic violence. It valorizes genocide and sectarian violence as bodily configuration of destruction on the mental, economic, social and political psyche of the people in time and space. Contextualising different perspectives from the World war I to the World war II, the holocaust, the experiences of the peoples of Afghanistan, Congo, Algeria, together with the Nigeria's Boko Haram insurgency and the Fulani Herdsmen's usurpation of lands are some examples of violence which directly or indirectly facilitate genocide. Similarly, the genocide experience of Namibia and the destruction of the Zulu kingdom of South Africa have all contributed to diverse application of genocide phenomenon which lends axiomatic credence to the loss of sense of belongings; the loss of lives and social abuse; physical and mental destruction; economic polarization and inhuman dispositions frequently experienced by people of diverse races. The imposition of colonialism, post-colonialism and neo-colonialism at divergent epochs have consequently crippled people and made them incapacitated to meet the immediate yearnings of their dynamic societies. The painful experience of genocide in Burundi and Rwanda has degenerated into hate and perjury. However, based on all those reflections on genocide, this paper specifically examines genocide and violence within the framework of Zimbabwean landscape and poetry in order to demonstrate that 'genocide has largely been visualized as a crime under international and national laws and has been criticized in all ramifications'. This paper is a response to how Zimbabwean people experience different categorizations of genocide and copious representations of these phenomena in poetry. It x-rays the human loss of lives, innate pogrom and psychological destructions ostensibly visualized by the people at different times before and after the independence of 1980. The paper showcases how Zimbabweans have not enjoyed the dividends of democracy, but rather experienced dejection in their lands leading to rejection and forceful migration to different countries. All poetry citations are to the collection of poetry entitled: (And Now the Poets Speak). This paper applies the genocide theory of 'final solution'- a psychological tenet which was propounded by Sabby Sagall and enhanced by Susan Zyl to explain the trajectory of genocide and how this brings the framework of violence to an end in Zimbabwe and in Africa at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the years, the notion of home has permeated disciplinary, inter- and cross-disciplinary enquiries into the human condition. In recent years, ideas, constructions and perceptions of 'homes' have been further complicated by constant shifts in conceptions and practices of transnational mobilities that have informed and disrupted ways of seeing, making and re-making homes at home and away from 'home'. In this article, we draw from Sara Ahmed's idea of home as 'a space within us' to read the novel We Need New Names (2013) by the transnational Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo as a text that interrogates the intertwined and complicated relationship between home, transnational identity and belonging. Focusing on the protagonist's experiences in both Zimbabwe and America, this article examines the idea of home as it refracts uniquely twenty-first-century experiences, perceptions and notions of transnational spaces, and shapes certain notions of identity, transnationality and belonging in We Need New Names. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Play language practices are common around the globe and have been described for several parts of the world. While some contributions on play language focus on the structure, manipulative strategies, and rules, this paper ties in with approaches that seek to view play language practices in their respective sociolinguistic contexts (e.g. Sherzer 2002; Storch 2011). Chibende, the play language practice under study in this paper, is analyzed in its Zimbabwean context. By looking at Zimbabwean examples and by broadening the perspective on these creative linguistic phenomena, it becomes evident that play languages are not performed in isolation but are deeply entangled with other language practices, such as youth language, as part of complex repertoires and social practices as well as acts of identity. By focusing on creativity and also taking the aspect of fun into account, the agency of the speakers becomes a central feature which is also reflected by the metalinguistic knowledge of the practitioners of Zimbabwean play language. In this regard, the discussion in this paper centers on the speakers' ideologies of play language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary-critical discourse on the Black Zimbabwean novel constitutes one of several platforms on which the self-other dialectic in Zimbabwe finds expression. This is especially the case at the level of literary-critical theory where the tendency is to advance arguments that frame Afrocentric and Eurocentric literary-critical theories as mutually exclusive. In this article, I explore the scholarship of Flora Veit-Wild and Ranka Primorac on the Black Zimbabwean novel with a view to discoursing the ways in which it can be argued that in their discussion of the corpus, the two scholars are anchored in the Eurocentric framework. In pursuing this objective, I focus on the critics’ reliance on Eurocentric literary-critical theories and apparent discomfiture with Afrocentric benchmarks in their criticism of the Black Zimbabwean novel. Thus, I argue in this article that while the version of critical discourse discussed here speaks to the complex and contradictory ways in which cultures find places of translation and dialogic engagement where history is made, the overall impression created by Veit-Wild and Primorac in their criticism of the Black Zimbabwean novel is that Eurocentric perspectives are universal, normative, and indispensable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most striking phenomena of Zimbabwean literature since the 1990s has been the boom in white memoirs. Often written from abroad, these texts respond to the hostile political climate of the land reforms by insisting upon their authors' right to speak as national subjects. This article studies four memoirs by the two most famous exponents of the genre, Alexandra Fuller and Peter Godwin. It argues that their texts negotiate a contested sense of belonging, challenged by their own doubts and expatriate position as well as by government exclusion. Outweighing such concerns, however, are the authors' continued family connections to the continent they have left behind. Their parents and siblings are used to insist upon the right of Fuller and Godwin, and with them whites more generally, to call Africa home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the leading character in Charles Mungoshi's Branching Streams Flow in the Dark (2013. Harare: Mungoshi Press), Serina Maseko, successfully foregrounds the desperate position of women who contract HIV from their husbands. It also explores the stigmatization that ensues. Mungoshi reveals that women like Serina are strong, and, despite the enormous odds, are able to overcome the oppression they experience in patriarchal Zimbabwe. Besides his critique of patriarchy, Mungoshi provides shrewd observations on the sanctimonious nature of some believers, like Laiza, the protagonist's mother, who is more concerned about her reputation within the church and her community than with her daughter's welfare. The novel also explores another recurrent theme in Mungoshi's earlier works written in English, the divided family, using the motif of branching streams. This is a metaphor for the brokenness caused by infidelity and abandonment that causes the division of one stream into many, suggesting that as one stream, the family would be stronger, and probably not 'in the Dark'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2000, a large number of memoirs by white Zimbabwean writers have emerged, often focusing on the complex relationship between history and the present, between personal and collective identity, and on displacement and nostalgia. One such memoir is Don't Let's Go To the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller (published in 2002). Recent criticism has focused on the discourse in the memoir, arguing that it represents settler discourse (or Rhodesian discourse) and draws on colonial imagery and ideology. This view is based on the memoir's representation of nostalgia and belonging in southern Africa. This article challenges some of these notions and suggests that the question is whether the memoir performs or portrays colonial ideology, and in what ways. Furthermore, "settler discourse" has not been properly defined in this context, despite being widely applied. Redefining settler discourse in the context of Fuller's memoir raises questions about white Zimbabwean writing in general, and demonstrates how inherently controversial the literature remains. Fuller's narrative voice, which switches between that of the child and the adult, is central to the analysis. My discussion shows that the child's voice performs Rhodesian discourse to a large extent, but that the adult narrator merely portrays such discourse and ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines post-independent Zimbabwean literary narratives which engage with how the ruling ZANU-PF government frames dissenting voices as constituting dirt, filth and undesirability. Making use of Achille Mbembe's postulations on the "vulgarity of power" and Kenneth W. Harrow's readings of the politics of dirt, the central thesis of this paper is that the troping of dirt and state sponsored violence are closely related to the themes of memory and belonging. Literary works by writers such as Chistopher Mlalazi, NoViolet Bulawayo and John Eppel become self-effacing speech acts that are involved in reimagining and revisioning our understanding of power dynamics and how this affects human and social experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent surges and advances in the popular use of electronic technology such as Internet, email, iPad, iPhone, and touch-screens in Africa have opened up great communicative possibilities among ordinary people whose voices were previously marginalized in traditional elitist media. People far apart geographically and living in different times can communicate rapidly and with great ease. This technological revolution has challenged and broken down boundaries of dependence on television, newspapers, and novels, the traditional forms of communication. It is now possible to upload a novel onto an iPad and read it as one moves from place to place. The burden of carrying hard copies is relieved but not eradicated; in most African countries, including Zimbabwe (the centre of focus in the present article), the creative work of art or hard copy of a novel is still relied upon as source of information. There are creative, experimental innovations in the novel form in Zimbabwe which to some extent can justify one's speaking of a hypertextual novel. This new type of novel incorporates multiple narratives, and sometimes deliberately uses genres such as the email form as a constitutive narrative style that confirms as well as destabilizes previous assumptions of single coherent stories told from one point of view. Using the concepts of hypertextuality, intertextuality, and Bakhtin's notions of carnivalesque and heteroglossia in speech and written utterances, this article reconsiders the implications of the presence of ideologies of hypertextuality in one novel from Zimbabwe, Nyaradzo Mtizira's The Chimurenga Protocol (2008). The article argues that the multiplicity of narratives constitutes the hypertextual dimension of the novelistic form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Conradian journey into the African interior also signified, in the Western colonial imaginary, an encounter with a seemingly incomprehensible spirituality. African spirituality was the site of excess, epitomized by darkness, frenzy, madness, superstition, and illogicality. Based on a reading of Andrea Eames's The Cry of the Go-Away Birdand Peter Godwin's Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, this article proposes that white-authored Zimbabwean narratives written after colonialism display a wider range of attitudes toward African spirituality, which are at once multiple and ambivalent. The two narratives, appearing at least a decade after Zimbabwe's independence from white minority rule, work against the dominant 'white' fear of Christian decline and the attendant descent into spiritual darkness and enable a secondary non-secular experimentation with African spirituality. I use the core concept of horror from Heart of Darknessto treat jointly the experience among whites in Africa of encountering an 'other' faith and the literary tradition of representing such an experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1980s Zimbabwe witnessed an ethnic cleansing which has been ignored in official state discourses and rendered unspeakable. This “moment of madness” (Ellis, 2006: 40), as Robert Mugabe called it, has come to be referred to as Gukurahundi. The minority Ndebele tribe was persecuted by government-backed forces. This article draws on the theoretical reflections of El Nossery and Hubbell who argue that even though some traumatic experiences may be unspeakable, they are not necessarily unrepresentable. Through an analysis of Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002), Christopher Mlalazi’s novel Running with Mother (2012), several poems by John Eppel as well as Owen Maseko’s paintings , this paper contends that these works of art broach a subject which has been rendered quasi-taboo. It is argued that these works of literature fictionalize, against the grain of the official national narrative, Zimbabwe’s traumatic postcolonial violence in which the national army turned against the country’s citizens under the guise of weeding out “dissidents” in the immediate post-independence period. Moreover, this article contends that fictional and artistic works function in such a way as to keep the memory of civilian victims alive, to heal the national trauma through memorializing it, and to call perpetrators to account by pointing out their culpability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to articulate the reasons behind the structure and style John Eppel employs in his novelAbsent: The English Teacher. Approaches to John Eppel's creative works have been myopic and slight. Attention has not been paid to the technical achievements and the deliberate construction that Eppel uses in his novelAbsent: The English Teacher. This paper eschews prior readings of this work in order to formulate a new one based on structure. By dealing with the unusual elements of the novel the paper explains the alternative ways of representation and storytelling found in the novel. The inclusion of certain structural elements in the novel by Eppel is found to be deliberate. It is concluded that the structure of the novel is appropriate to the story because of the occupation of the protagonist. Multi-genre inclusion in the prose of the novel is identified, assessed and the impact towards its contribution to the narrative objectives is highlighted. This paper argues that Eppel should rightly be considered a member of the Zimbabwean literary establishment based on his innovative creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the intricacies of violence through character naming in selected Ndebele Zimbabwean literature of the liberation struggle. The inception of colonialism in the then Rhodesia was marked by violence by the coloniser towards the colonised and this meant that appropriate liberatory violence had to be used to counter the coloniser's. This is shown through character names and motifs drawn from two novels; Ndlovu's Inhlamvu ZaseNgondlweni (1972) and Hleza's Emfuleni Wezinyembezi (1990). The theoretical framework used to analyse the characters' names is Manichean psychology. Character names of selected works illustrate that the Rhodesian oppressive government used church and education as oppressive agents and the oppressed cunningly used those same institutions as means of overthrowing the same regime. The article, therefore, argues that the power of naming is performative; since it has the capability to control nature and behaviour of name holders. The article concludes that writers have effectively exploited character names to chart their own course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines Lawrence Hoba’s The Trek and Other Stories (2009), which describes experiences from the post-2000 land invasions and fast-track land reform in Zimbabwe. It analyses selected short stories in relation to other Zimbabwean fictional works about land and the definition and restoration of dignified and other identities lost during Rhodesian colonialism. The article also discusses the significance of the narrative style, especially satire, and some of the themes, such as violence, dislocation, the position of women during the land reform and the multiple migration patterns in the land invasions, in an effort to foreground how all these link with Hoba’s cynicism and, at times, subversive perceptions on how the land issue has been handled in post2000 Zimbabwe. The argument here is that Hoba’s fictional writings about the post-2000 land invasions and fast track land redistribution programme are reflective of a marked departure from the pro-nationalist, ideological and backward looking fictional mappings of land and national belonging. These writings place the ‘now’ as critical in unpacking the ironies and contradictory impact of the land redistribution exercise on ordinary Zimbabweans.

With the ruling Zanu-PF’s stranglehold on Zimbabwean media, and the same party’s intolerance for dissent, literature has become part of the country’s public sphere in contesting the ruling party’s exclusivist imaginaries of belonging. Such literature, and some of its publishing methods, offer alternative possibilities that suggest a need to re-open the terms of national belonging, thus troubling categories such as race and ethnicity in what can be called a politics of recognition. In many ways, Bryony Rheam’sThis September Sun, writings by John Eppel, and the late Julius Chingono inTogether, some of the short stories inWhere to Now? Short Stories from Zimbabwe, and NoViolet Bulawayo’sWe Need New Namesask what has happened to ideas of tolerance, reconciliation, inclusivity and human diversity in Zimbabwe. Through various strategies of indirection, Zimbabwean writers present counter-discursive voices that suggest alternative and inclusive imaginaries of nationhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a literary/textual analysis of the perceptions of ordinary Zimbabweans to Zimbabwe–China relations. It does this through an analysis of examples drawn from Zimbabwe’s urban grooves music and literature, namely Wallace Chirumiko’s song ‘Made in China’ and NoViolet Bulawayo’sWe Need New Names. Both texts offer a counter-narrative that contests and subverts the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front’s (ZANU PF) ‘Look East’ policy, which presents an elitist political perspective propagated through state controlled media coverage. This ‘Look East’ narrative is projected as de-linking Zimbabwe from western capitalism and is chiefly considered in a context where ordinary Zimbabweans’ perceptions on Zimbabwe–China relations are essentially inaudible. However, this narrative is severely undermined by most ordinary Zimbabweans who, through jokes, humour, catchphrases, anecdotes, music and literature express their scepticism and cynicism as they mainly view it as a mere desperate attempt by the political elite to cling onto power. Wallace Chirimuko’s ‘Made in China’ mocks and laughs at ZANU PF’s ‘Look East’ policy as it underscores the fact that Zimbabwe–China relations are largely based on deception. NoViolet Bulawayo’sWe Need New Namessees Zimbabwe–China relations as largely benefiting China, which is depicted as crudely exploitative in its relations with Zimbabwe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Zimbabwe, autobiographies, particularly political ones, are sites of contestations, compositions, decompositions and recompositions of national narratives. In their obsession with the self, they always centre the narrating subjectivity whilst at the same time decentering and recentering others. This means that in this literary gamesmanship, certain political personalities are displaced, peripherised, and debunked in this historical re-imagination. Tekere in his autobiography, A Life time of Struggle (2007), seeks to impose his political credentials and legitimacy in the national script in the face of what he sees and stigmatises as opportunism by many politicians, and how these politicians were catapulted into positions of power by default. To dramatise this, his autobiography employs binary tropes that mark him out as iconic and a quintessence of virtue as opposed to the insipid, dour, corrupt and wishy-washy others. In this paper we argue that Tekere's autobiographical act, coming as it does after he has been pushed outside the ruling circles, is meant to portray him as the personification of revolutionary incorruptibility which both the colonial and postcolonial regimes felt threatened by. This autobiography is, therefore, a conscious and deliberate act of inscribing the self into the Zimbabwean historico-literary landscape. It presents an alternative frame to the hegemonic master-discourses of the fetishised, Mugabe-centred patriotic history on and about Zimbabwe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The protean and contested symbols of Zimbabwean literature remain the land and invented heroes, including a hagiographic iconisation of shrines, best seen in the Zimbabwe ruins, the Zimbabwe Bird and the national heroes’ acre. In South African white writings, the symbolic topos has been dominated by prison walls, the hangman’s noose, Robben Island and, in the post-apartheid era, Saartjie Baartman and the imagined rainbow generated through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The horrors of apartheid are ideographically embodied in Coetzee’s tongueless protagonist, Foe. In both locales, white writings – fictive renditions and auto/biographical – have invited critically legitimated constructs of coherence. This article contends that answers to our present postcolonial crises inhere in the multiplicity of voices, not monological narratives. Diversity, and therefore polyphony, is valued for its ability to suggest multiple ways of seeing and belonging to national imaginaries; its ability to suggest answers to the postcolonial problematic related to memory, heritage and transformation. This article explores how the meanings of cultural objects often display shifting appropriations that garner either symbolic or ephemeral qualities, demonstrating the ability of those in power at different historical junctures to determine and confer minted meanings. In turn, this anxiety and re-membering of space and symbol has a bearing on ownership claims, and gives rise to a choreographed heritage discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering literature as a system in dialogue with non-literary systems, this article discusses the ways in which white writing in Zimbabwe finds itself marginalised from mainstream Zimbabwean literature owing to monological approaches which see the literary system as uniform, static and closed. Feeding from, and into, political, media and literary discourses on belonging, these approaches accomplish thenucleationof the system by imposing various forms of nuclei in the form of Rhodesian/colonial sensibilities and allegiances which white writing supposedly has. While it is true that some white narratives exhibit strong affinities towards the colonial past, it should also be noted that such narratives are only part of the system and resultantly the system should not in any way be reducible to this or any other segment.Enucleationis proffered as an alternative conceptualisation of the literary and cultural system in that it redeems systems from the demands of sameness and stasis. The place white writing occupies in Zimbabwe’s post-2000 cultural landscape, for instance, serves to illustrate how questions of memory and heritage always involve the intertwining of several cultural forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we discuss how places of belonging are imagined in relatively recent white Zimbabwean narratives dealing with issues of land, landscape, and belonging. Two white Zimbabwean narratives, Peter Rimmer’s Cry of the Fish Eagle (1993) and Douglas Rogers’ The Last Resort (2009), are read for the ways in which the paradoxically imagined spaces of the “bush” and the “farm” can be seen to enable, in alternate forms, exigent accommodations with place under different historical and political circumstances. In Cry of the Fish Eagle, which preceded Zimbabwe’s land reform process of the 2000s, “bush” is a privileged category by virtue of its supra-national allowance of a claim to white belonging in “Africa” at large. In The Last Resort, on the other hand, the “bush” is a derelict wilderness rescued by the ingenuity of white subjects, who create “farms” of splendid regenerative capacity in an effort to purchase belonging in the Zimbabwean nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a reading of white Zimbabwean narratives that takes cognisance of how the Rhodesian past and the Zimbabwean present inhabit shared time and place. This reading suggests that white Zimbabwean narratives are characterised by simultaneity. In these texts it can be seen that the (Rhodesian) past and the (Zimbabwean) present appear incommensurate but nevertheless coeval. Using Ian Smith'sThe Great Betrayal: The Memoirs of Ian Douglas Smith(hereafter referred to asThe Great Betrayal), I argue that in Zimbabwe, like in other former colonies, the colonial past exists alongside the post-colonial present despite persistent calls by the new post-colonial governments for former colonisers to forget. In Smith'sThe Great Betrayal, the past inhabits the present in three forms: as an endurance of the founding principles of British Empire; as an indictment of the Zimbabwean present; and as a strategic emplacement of white Rhodesians within a new Zimbabwe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Homosexuality in Zimbabwe often evokes strong reactions. Due to a tradition of silence, the topic largely continues to be taboo. However, it has been used by some politicians and church leaders to strengthen arguments and to denounce opponents. It is against this background thatThe Hairdresser of Harare(Huchu, 2010) ought to be understood. The novel gives helpful clues into discourses on homosexuality in contemporary Zimbabwe. This article analyzes the author’s approach to the subject and critiques it. It maintains that the author’s view on homosexuality has been limited by attaching the theme to postcolonial politics and violence. However, the article appreciates his courage in exploring the theme. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Zimbabwean children's literature has witnessed considerable expansion since the attainment of independence in 1980. It has addressed numerous themes, although it has tended to avoid overtly political issues. This article examines new developments in this literary genre. It focuses on one creative work that employs the perspectives of girl children to describe challenging experiences. The article analyses NoViolet Bulawayo'sWe Need New Names(2013) to understand the resilience of the girl child in Zimbabwe. It examines this literary work as part of Zimbabwean children's literature. It contends that the author provides an effective account of how Zimbabwean children demonstrate resilience and deploy agency to negotiate a very difficult context. However, the article also argues that Bulawayo's approach to the theme has some weaknesses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article looks at inscriptions of whiteness in selected white Zimbabwean narratives. Through a reading of Andrea Eames'The Cry of the Go-Away Bird(2011), Alexandra Fuller'sDon't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight(2003) and John Eppel'sAbsent: the English Teacher(2009), the argument proposes that white Zimbabwean narratives situate whiteness within the context of change and marginality in Zimbabwe. The narratives deal with experiences of change and apprehensions of lived reality marked by the transfer of power from white minority to black majority rule. Our reading ofThe Cry of the Go-Away Birdexamines how whiteness in the postcolonial Zimbabwean state is perceived through an outsider's gaze, resulting in a kind of double consciousness within the (racialized, white) subject of the gaze. It is argued that the text depicts whites as torn between two unreconciled streams of possibility, reinforcing their sense of alienation. Fuller'sDon't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonightrepresents whiteness as a thoroughly ephemeral experience. The meaning of whiteness is mediated through perpetual physical movement as whites travel from one point to another. Eppel'sAbsent: the English Teacheraffords a rethinking of whiteness as an unstable form of identity contingent on historical and political factors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Izichothozoare insults used in gaming that can be identified as part of the ‘prohibited’ Ndebele folklore. This verbal art form is a form of folk humour popular with Ndebele youth. However, adults also play the game. The game is considered obscene by many people, at least in public, but most people may be playing it, especially using non-obscene themes. This paper is a thematic categorisation ofizichothozo. It identifies the themes that are pursued in the folk humour. Images that are used inizichothozoare derived from a range of themes that help derive the humour. Social realities are subjected to humorous transformations, and these social and cultural realities are used as themes to deriveizichothozo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores intra-urban mobilities and the depiction of the city in contemporary Zimbabwean literature as reflected in Valerie Tagwira’s Uncertainty of Hope. It shall be argued that intra-urban mobilities are closely related to the depiction of the city as a heterogeneous space that is unevenly constituted. This unevenness is influenced by economic and political factors and translates into the realm of the social and symbolic as some spaces are projected as “safe” and “respectable” while others are conceptualized as of “ill repute” and “threat” to the security, morals, and safety of its inhabitants. However, the boundaries between “safe” and “threatening” spaces are constantly transgressed by Zimbabwean urban dwellers in their day to day struggles for survival in a harsh and unrelenting economic and political climate. This political and economic environment has resulted in most Zimbabweans being insecure as testified by heightened intra-urban mobilities. Furthermore, the insecurity and intra-urban mobility are exemplified by the creation of unstable identities premised on fear, anxiety, and restlessness that characterize the lives of most urban dwellers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The poetry of Bart Wolffe, the self-exiled white Zimbabwean writer, exposes the role of the environment and life experiences in shaping identity. For Wolffe, nature signifies refuge, tranquillity, and harmony; it is a sanctuary, more accommodating than the violent and harsh human society. In this paper, I advance the argument that a reading of Wolffe's poetry shows that he uses nature to construct his identity and belonging and as a means of self-definition, that is, of trying to make sense of himself. But his project of belonging and identity construction in postcolonial Zimbabwe is somehow complicated by his whiteness or positionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines linguistic hegemony and linguistic exclusion in the Zimbabwean print and broadcasting media. The discussion is based on the fact that the media carry language, operate through language and contribute to language promotion and development. Therefore, this article argues that there is need for a sound and working language policy for the print and broadcasting media in Zimbabwe. The language used in information dissemination, public debates and communication can include or exclude some speech communities in the country. However, the language choices in the media in Zimbabwe demonstrate multilayered linguistic hegemonies where English is generally the dominant language, while Shona and Ndebele are hegemonic to the other languages in Zimbabwe. This situation is attributed to the fact that the broadcasting media in Zimbabwe are part of the colonial heritage; that there is a lack of a clear and consistent language policy of the media in Zimbabwe, which is reflective of the absence of a comprehensible national language policy; that the domination of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation leaves no room for meaningful and authentic competing community radio and television stations; that the media in Zimbabwe are business and political organisations; and that the media in Zimbabwe are appendages of the global media system which favour the use of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines Lawrence Hoba's The Trek and Other Stories (2009), which describes experiences from the post-2000 land invasions and fast-track land reform in Zimbabwe. It analyses selected short stories in relation to other Zimbabwean fictional works about land and the definition and restoration of dignified and other identities lost during Rhodesian colonialism. The article also discusses the significance of the narrative style, especially satire, and some of the themes, such as violence, dislocation, the position of women during the land reform and the multiple migration patterns in the land invasions, in an effort to foreground how all these link with Hoba's cynicism and, at times, subversive perceptions on how the land issue has been handled in post-2000 Zimbabwe. The argument here is that Hoba's fictional writings about the post-2000 land invasions and fast track land redistribution programme are reflective of a marked departure from the pro-nationalist, ideological and backward looking fictional mappings of land and national belonging. These writings place the 'now' as critical in unpacking the ironies and contradictory impact of the land redistribution exercise on ordinary Zimbabweans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]