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In this volume, Graham investigates the relation between land and nationalism in South African and Zimbabwean fiction from the 1960s to the present. This comparative study, the first of its kind, discusses a wide range of writing against a backdrop of regional decolonization, including novels by the prize-winning authors J.M Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Chenjerai Hove, and Yvonne Vera. By employing a range of critical perspectives—cultural materialist, feminist and ecocritical—this book offers new ways of thinking about the relationship between literature, politics and the environment in Southern Africa. The return of land has been central to the material and cultural struggles for decolonization in Southern Africa, yet between the advent of democracy in Zimbabwe (1980) and South Africa (1994) and Zimbabwe’s decision to fast-track land redistribution in 2000, it has been limited land reform rather than widespread land redistribution that has prevailed. During this period nationalist discourses of reconciliation and economic development replaced those of revolution and decolonization. This book develops a critique of both forms of nationalistic narrative by focusing on how different and often opposing idea of land and nation are reflected, refracted and even refused in the fictions.
By employing a range of critical perspectives—cultural materialist, feminist and ecocritical— Graham investigates the relation between land and nationalism in South African and Zimbabwean fiction from the 1960s to the present. This study discusses a wide range of writing including novels by Coetzee, Gordimer, Head, Hove, and Vera.
Focusing on two white settler societies, South Africa and Australia, this book investigates the meaning of 'the South' as an aesthetic, political geographical and cultural space. This is a landmark in post-colonial theory and criticism.Text, Theory, Space is a landmark in post-colonial criticism and theory. Focusing on two white settler societies, South Africa and Australia, the contributors investigate the meaning of 'the South' as an aesthetic, political, geographical and cultural space.Drawing upon a wide range of disciplines which include literature, history, urban and cultural geography, politics and anthropology, the contributors examine crucial issues including:* defining what 'the South' encompasses* investigating ideas of space, history, land and landscape* claiming, naming and possessing land* national and personal boundaries* questions of race, gender and nationalism
How representations of land and landscape perform important metaphorical labor in African literatures
The idea of the nation or nationalism in relation to Africa and African literature has been widely dealt with in modern African literature, arising from the fact that writers are bent on expressing their concern about the future of their countries. Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Kofi Awoonor are such writers who have made great artistic efforts to portray an Afrotopia, or at best viable socio-political systems in the wake of colonial situation. The present work aims to examine closely these novelists' ideological convictions as they are expressed in their fictions and often shown to be in opposition to the practices established by the state apparatuses in place. This book shows how the African situation has been characterised in the African novels by both a common continental experience and a number of facts that dramatise the historical predicament of slavery, colonialism and a problematic independence. These representations carry dialogical voices which underpin the authoritative voice of the authors. The narratives of the nation are shown to be ambivalent, for they seem to act in defence of the novelists' culture, yet they jettison its very quintessence by the sceptical view they reflect about its significance in modern times. Caught between the imperatives of modernity and the nostalgic drives of the past, the novelists are somehow drawn to condemn the metropolis and to celebrate it at the same time. The point is to accept the construction of the nation-state in connection with universal concepts developed by the Western world and Europe essentially. The different 'utopias' offered by the writers under scrutiny cannot be divorced from the theory and practice that have led to the construction of European models of nation-states. Hence our reliance on important scholarly works in the field, particularly Elie Kedourie's Nationalism, Eric Hobsbawm's Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalsim. But for the theoretical link between nationalism and literary interpretation, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, Homi Bhabha's Nation and Narration and The Location of Culture, Edward Said's Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism and Bakhtin's The dialogical Imagination are fundamental supports for my discussion. Critics that have approached this subject are restrictive in number, but I have taken account of the studies carried out by James Ogude on Ngugi, Leif Lorentzon on Armah, for example, or general works like Abiola Irele's The African Experience in Literature and Ideology or Kanneh Kadiatu's African Identities, amongst others, to substantiate the discussion Due appreciation of the different styles used by the writers is expressed here from a modernism used by early Armah and Awoonor, to the realism of Achebe and Marxist-populist treatment of fiction and nation-building of Ngugi, as well as the essentialist slant that can be studied in Armah's later fiction. Concepts such as hybridity, ambivalence, liminality, developed by Bhabha, are useful elements of analysis in the examination of the evolution of prose fiction in Africa from the early writings of Achebe to the later works of Armah and Ngugi. They allow us to see how the African novelists produce meanings that underscore the realities and difficulties met in the construction of stable and genuinely independent nation-states in Africa.
Winner of the Macmillan Prize for African Adult Fiction An uncompromising novel by one of Africa's premiere writers, detailing the horrors of civil war in luminous, haunting prose In 1980, after decades of guerilla war against colonial rule, Rhodesia earned its hard-fought-for independence from Britain. Less than two years thereafter when Mugabe rose to power in the new Zimbabwe, it signaled the begining of brutal civil unrest that would last nearly a half decade more. With The Stone Virgins Yvonne Vera examines the dissident movement from the perspective of two sisters living in a small township outside of Bulawayo. In a portrait painted in successive impressions of life before and after the liberation, Vera explores the quest for dignity and a centered existence against a backdrop of unimaginable violence; the twin instincts of survival and love; the rival pulls of township and city life; and mankind's capacity for terror, beauty, and sacrifice. One sister will find a reason for hope. One will not make it through alive. Weaving historical fact within a story of grand passions and striking endurance, Vera has gifted us with a powerful and provocative testament to the resilience of the Zimbabwean people.