Space Nostalgia in The Old Drift: Memorializing Matha Mwamba, the Afronaut
Maria Menzel
Abstract:In the two former Cold War superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union, memorializations of the space race serve as sites of nostalgia, fueling feelings of national pride. This paper investigates this in a Zambian context by analyzing how the history of Zambia’s participation in the space race is fictionalized in Namwali Serpell's novel The Old Drift. The novel creates a fictionalized account of the childhood and adolescence of Zambia's first female Afronaut, Matha Mwamba, filling the silence in the archives reg… Show more
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