Life-Writing from the Margins in Zimbabwe: Versions and Subversions of Crisis

ISBN-13: 9781032178110 / Angielski / Miękka / 2021 / 248 str.

Oliver Nyambi

Opis

This book explores the unique contributions of various forms of post-2000 life-writings such as the autobiography, epistles and biographies to discourses about the nature and socio-politics of what has become known as the Zimbabwean crisis (c. 2000 -2009).

Recenzje

"This book will be an important intervention on the Zimbabwean literary scene that helps us to understand how writers from quite different perspectives have used life writing to tell their versions of the recent past. With its theoretically rich readings and helpful contextualizations, the book will also be of interest to readers not familiar with the Zimbabwean context who may instead be drawn to the author’s ability to balance sympathy and criticism, or to his nuanced considerations of the role of life writing in archiving the self at times of crisis."

- Theresa A. Kulbaga, Miami University

Spis treści

1. Introduction: Contested versions of Nation, Nationness and Nationality  2. "Howzat": Cricket, re-presenting and representing the nation in crisis in Henry Olonga’s Blood, Sweat and Treason: My Story  3. Alternative iconographies: recentering ‘unconventional’ memories in Tekere’s A Lifetime of Struggle  4. "All the Beautiful Soldiers": Narrating Trauma and State Violence in Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives  5. "Through the Eyes of a Mum": The Affects of Disclosure and Moral Justice in Cathy Buckle's Life Writings of the Crisis  6. "... In the Midst of a Very Dark Africa": Land, Spirituality and an Enduring Coloniality in Henry Jackson's Another Farm in Africa  7. Black Racism?: Negotiating the Colour of Belonging in Mugabe and the White African   

O autorze

Oliver Nyambi teaches postcolonial African literature and culture in the Department of English at the University of the Free State in South Africa. He has held several research positions, amongst them, a writing Fellowship in the Duke Africa Initiative program at Duke University, USA, and recently as a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies’ African Humanities Program. He is currently an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow hosted by Prof. Susan Arndt in the Department of English Studies and Anglophone Literatures at Bayreuth University in Germany.