Animals, Nostalgia and Zimbabwe’s Rural Landscape in the Poetry of Chenjerai Hove and Musaemura Zimunya

Mthatiwa, Syned

doi:10.18772/22016069131.16

Cited by 3 publications

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“…As F. Fiona Moolla (2016) notes in the introduction to a collection of essays on ecocriticism in Africa, 'environment and animals fundamentally constitute the worldviews and lifeways that have created these cultural "texts"' (9). 1 Other essays in that collection pay tribute to the world beyond humans in Africa focusing on topics such as land mythologies in Shona cosmology (Musiyiwa 2016), animals in Zimbabwe poetry (Mthatiwa 2016), and 'the environment as significant other' (Mapara 2016). The reader will notice the Southern African slant of these titles which makes my own more encompassing Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (2018) a welcome addition to this corpus.…”

Section: Cajetan Ihekamentioning

confidence: 99%

Routledge Handbook of African Literature

Adejunmobi¹,

Coetzee

2019

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The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an expansion of critical approaches to African literature. The Routledge Handbook of African Literature is a one-stop publication bringing together studies of African literary texts that embody an array of newer approaches applied to a wide range of works. This includes frameworks derived from food studies, utopian studies, network theory, eco-criticism, and examinations of the human/animal interface alongside more familiar discussions of postcolonial politics.The handbook is divided into seven parts: i) Mapping political agencies, ii) Journeys, geographies, identities, iii) Working through genre, iv) The world of and beyond humans, v) Everyday sociality, vi) Bodies, subjectivities, affect, vii) Literary networks. In each, contributors address the themes of the section from a variety of perspectives in conjunction with analysis of different literary texts. All chapters are original research essays written by a broad spectrum of scholars with expertise in the subject, providing an application of the most recent insights into analysis of particular topics or application of particular critical frameworks to one or more African literary works.The handbook will be a valuable interdisciplinary resource for scholars and students of African literature, African culture, postcolonial literature and literary analysis.

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Section: Cajetan Ihekamentioning

confidence: 99%

Routledge Handbook of African Literature

Adejunmobi¹,

Coetzee

2019

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“…Ownership of vast tracts of land ensured that in Rhodesia the the colonists had a greater sense of belonging than the marginalized and alienated black majority (Fisher, 2010: 221). For the Shona people of Zimbabwe, for instance, this colonial experience of land dispossession dislocated and overturned their “autochthonous conceptualization of belonging” (Seirlis, 2004: 409) evident in their mwana wevhu (child of the soil) land philosophy, as they were alienated and uprooted from the ancestral lands that formed the core of their existence (Mthatiwa, 2016: 279). Such experiences triggered expressions like pasi papinduka (the land has been turned upside down) that in turn inspired a call to arms in the struggle for liberation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Home and belonging in Irene Sabatini’s The Boy Next Door and Andrea Eames’ The Cry of the Go-Away Bird

Mthatiwa

2018

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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In this article I examine how, in their novels The Boy Next Door and The Cry of the Go-Away Bird, Irene Sabatini and Andrea Eames, respectively, allow us to reflect on questions of whiteness, home, and belonging in Zimbabwe. I argue that in these novels the experiences, behaviours, and attitudes of whites towards Africa and black people contest and subvert their belonging to Zimbabwe and highlight their failure to accept the end of Rhodesia. White people’s resistance to integration into Zimbabwe, their continued racializing of space, and their attempts to maintain white power and privilege bring whiteness sharply before the scrutiny of the black gaze and provoke anti-white rhetoric as well as a discourse on white unbelonging to Zimbabwe that becomes more strident and violent from the late 1990s.

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Precarious Geography: Landscape, Memory, Identity and Ethno-regional Nationalism in Niger Delta Poetry

Okuyade

2021

East-West Cultural Passage

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Like most conflicts across the world, the Niger Delta crisis has generated a body of works now labelled Niger Delta literature. These cultural art forms, which are not only programmatic in thrust but also carry a dissenting temper that is laden with counter hegemonic rhetoric, are primarily geared towards underpinning a brutish kind of colonization and corporate greed which has become the stamp of toxic dreaming and dubious progress in Nigeria. This literature draws attention to the debility of the Niger Delta people and to the fact that they are trapped under double hegemons – the Nigerian government and transnational oil firms – that have strategically transformed or reduced this precarious geography and its inhabitants to mere commodities. A close reading of texts on the Niger Delta makes one aware of the politics and structure of the Nigerian economy and the corporate cost of petroculture; moreover, issues of ethno-regional identity, the inequity in the distribution of resources, the near absence of government presence in the Niger Delta and the continuous decay of state infrastructures provide a fertile ground for explaining the resentment expressed by these heavily marginalized people. By protesting their marginality, these poets frame a kind of identity that “others” the Niger Delta people, thereby holding the state accountable for its deplorable conditions and the abysmal underdevelopment of the region considering the quantity of wealth it generates for the Nigerian federation. Paying significant attention to the relationship between the representations of landscape and processes of political and economic transformation and how the landscape becomes the defining index for identity formation in the poetry of Tanure Ojaide and Ibiware Ikiriko, I argue that these poets point to the way in which colonialism and environmental devastation are interlocking systems of domination within the Nigerian nation.

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Animals, Nostalgia and Zimbabwe’s Rural Landscape in the Poetry of Chenjerai Hove and Musaemura Zimunya

Cited by 3 publications

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Routledge Handbook of African Literature

Routledge Handbook of African Literature

Home and belonging in Irene Sabatini’s The Boy Next Door and Andrea Eames’ The Cry of the Go-Away Bird

Precarious Geography: Landscape, Memory, Identity and Ethno-regional Nationalism in Niger Delta Poetry

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