Born and Hannah Arendt's Notion of Individual Responsibility 'Morality concerns the individual in his singularity'. Hannah Arendt, 'Some Questions of Moral Philosophy' 'all the cool sadness seemed able to do was to raise thoughts of the lonely figure finding it more and more difficult to justify his own honesty'. Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born Hannah Arendt's unique elaborations on imperialism and totalitarianism have given rise to many polemics during the last decades. In particular, her views on imperialism as a test laboratory for emerging European totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism have been seen as an important early contribution to the corpus of postcolonial theory. 1 Yet at the same time, scholars have clearly shown that Arendt was not straightforwardly an anti-imperialist thinker, and too often implicitly aligned herself with the viewpoints of colonizers confronted by unknown and 'uncivilized' cultures in Africa, and thus unfortunately maintained a Eurocentric approach to African cultures. 2 The work in question, particularly in its historical details, often remains vague, but the strength of The Origins, as with her whole oeuvre, lies not in its historical exactness, but rather in its bold attempt to create connections and to think anew; thus I claim that it is particularly Arendt's idea of radical thinking that we need again in our globalized world plagued with structural inequalities. I maintain further that regardless of her unfortunate Eurocentric remarks, the theoretical tools concerning political philosophy, totalitarianism, and imperialism that she provided remain vitally important for researchers focusing on African cultures and their current political problems.
This article focuses on Tsitsi Dangarembga's novel This Mournable Body (2018), which completes her trilogy on Tambudzai Sigauke's life story in relation to the neoliberal political order in contemporary Zimbabwe. The country has been recently referred to as cultivating ultra-neoliberal policies, and, in such a framework, state repression becomes replaced by state negligence towards citizens' economic survival. In This Mournable Body, neoliberalism and the uneven accumulation of wealth are portrayed through the tourism industry. The novel shows deepening forms of injustice and economic discrepancies in neoliberal Zimbabwe, where impoverished groups of people, living in the cities as well as outside them, are compelled to commodify their lives for the needs of the tourism industry in order to get by. In the novel, Tambudzai emerges as an egoistic character, as she epitomises a new type of neoliberal citizen-subject who is ready to maximise her own benefits at the expense of others and whose ambitions remain only in her own career. I analyse her character with regard to the so-called sell-out mentality; however, Dangarembga depicts Tambudzai's unpatriotic behaviour as a defence mechanism, which finally gives way to full mourning at the end of the novel. Dangarembga's critical characterisation of the neoliberal forms of capitalism is juxtaposed with her representation of an alternative unhu/ubuntu business model at the end of the novel. However, even if Dangarembga proposes unhu/ubuntu business as a Zimbabwean form of balanced capitalist enterprise, I argue that neoliberal markets are taking advantage of these African forms of capitalism as well. The romanticised ending of the novel slightly undermines its otherwise astute illustration of uneven development in neoliberal Zimbabwe, which contributes to rural and urban poverty, communal rupture and drastic forms of citizen competition.
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