Overview

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). Much of what has been written about the Zimbabwean crisis – a decade-long period of unprecedented economic collapse and political upheavals in the southern African country – is strictly discipline-specific and therefore limited to unidimensional modes of theorising the crisis’s many and complex dimensions and dynamics. In this context, this book charts a paradigm shift in hermeneutic and epistemological approaches to comprehending the Zimbabwean crisis. Life-Writing from the Margins in Zimbabwe centres the experiences and memories of ordinary Zimbabweans in pluralizing modes of seeing and knowing the crisis. The book argues that these life-writings present a rich site for encountering versions of the crisis that relate in counter-discursive ways, to the dominant, state-authored narrative of the nation in crisis. Oliver Nyambi’s analysis contributes new ideas to ongoing debates about how cultural texts reflect on the postcoloniality of both power, and experiences and negotiations of power in the context of crisis. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of African literature, Zimbabwean/African studies, postcolonial literature, life-writing and cultural studies.

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9781032178110

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Reviews

"""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"

Author Information

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.

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