About the Book
This book explores how popular cultural artifacts, literary texts, commemorative practices and other forms of remembrances are used to convey, transmit and contest memories of mass atrocities in the Global South. Some of these historical atrocities took place during the Cold war. As such, this book unpacks the influence or role of the global powers in conflict in the Global South. Contributors are grappling with a number of issues such as the politics of memorialization, memory conflicts, exhumations, reburials, historical dialogue, peacebuilding and social healing, memory activism, visual representation, transgenerational transmission of memories, and identity politics.
Table of Contents:
CHAPTER 1: Introduction. Mass atrocities, memory and cultural representations in the Global South - Lungile A. Tshuma, Mphathisi Ndlovu and Shepherd Mpofu.- CHAPTER 2: Decolonizing memory studies - Lungile Augustine Tshuma.- CHAPTER 3: The Cold War politics and the dynamics of conflicts in the Global South - Mphathisi Ndlovu and Lungile A. Tshuma.- CHAPTER 4: Resisting oblivion and memory: The destruction of Gukurahundi memorial plaques in Zimbabwe - Shepherd Mpofu and Siphosami Malunga, Executive Director of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA) and a human rights lawyer.- CHAPTER 5: A Country of Mass Graves: Topography of Death and the Spectrality of Disappearances in Contemporary Mexico - Pedro J Gonzalez Corona, PhD, Assistant Professor - Holocaust Studies, University of Texas at Dallas, USA.- CHAPTER 6: Memories of Nigeria-Biafra War, 1967-1970: A Case of Nsukka Igbo - Ngozika Anthonia Obi-Ani, Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and International Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka.- CHAPTER 7: Memoricide, Apologias, and Representation: Centring Rwanda’s ‘Double Genocide’ Discourse in the Present Tense - Nick Mdika Tembo, PhD, Associate Professor and Head of the English Department at the University of Malawi.- CHAPTER 8: Fiction literary texts as sites of alternative memory and archive making. By Gibson Ncube, PhD, Lecturer at Stellenbosch University and Yemurai Gwatirisa, PhD, Senior Lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe.- CHAPTER 9: “Carving their place in history”: Reconstructing Public Memories of Colonial Struggle through Women’s Writing. By Asante Lucy Mtenje, PhD, Associate Professor at University of Malawi.- CHAPTER 10: Genocide, memory work and the falsehood of human rights in postapartheid South Africa - Khanyile Mlotshwa, PhD, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (RLS) Global Scholarly Dialogue Programme research fellow.- CHAPTER 11: ‘Witnessing’ and ‘postmemories’ in Gukurahundi Documentary Films: A case study of The Children of the Genocide (2021) - Mphathisi Ndlovu.- CHAPTER 12: Exploring the representation of genocidal rape in Hotel Rwanda (2004) and The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo (2007): A gendered perspective - Blessed Ngwenya, PhD, Research Associate at the University of South Africa, and Mcebisi Ngwenya, Independent Researcher.- CHAPTER 13: The constructions of the Homoine massacre in Mozambican mainstream newspapers - Isaias Carlos Fuel, PhD candidate at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, Alexandre Dinis Zavala, PhD, Lecturer at Escola Superior de Journalismo, Mozambique and Carlos Vitannisso, lecturer at Escola Superior de Journalismo, Mozambique.- CHAPTER 14: On memory-making: Truth telling, reconciliation and peacebuilding in Zimbabwe - Darlington Tshuma, policy analyst and governance specialist/2021 Africa Policy Fellow of the School of Transnational Governance (STG) at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy and Talent Moyo, Lecturer at the Midlands State University, Zimbabwe.
About the Author :
Mphathisi Ndlovu is a research fellow at Stellenbosch University (South Africa). Mphathisi is also an Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at the National University of Science and Technology (Zimbabwe). He is also an alumnus of the Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability (AHDA) fellowship at Columbia University's Institute for the Study of Human Rights. Mphathisi holds a PhD in Journalism from Stellenbosch University. His research interests are in collective memory, identity politics and digital cultures. Mphathisi’s works have been published as book chapters, and peer reviewed articles in journals such as Digital Journalism, African Cultural Studies, Journal of Genocide Research, and Nations and Nationalism. Mphathisi is also co-editor of a book titled The Idea of Matabeleland in Digital Spaces: Genealogies, Discourses and EpistemicStruggles (2022).
Lungile Augustine Tshuma holds a PhD in Journalism from the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He is a Senior PostDoctoral Fellow in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. Lungile is also an Associate Professor in the department of Journalism and Media Studies at the National University of Science and Technology (Zimbabwe). His research interests are in journalism, photography and memory. He has published in local and international peer reviewed journals and among them are: African Journalism Studies, Nations and Nationalism, Media Culture and Society, and Journal of Communication Inquiry.
Shepherd Mpofu is Associate Professor of Media and Communication at the University of South Africa. He has published several articles on communication, media and journalism in Africa. His body of work covers social media and politics; social media and identity; social media and protests. He is the co-editor of New Journalism Ecologies in East and Southern Africa: Innovations, Participatory and Newsmaking Cultures (Palgrave 2023); Decolonising Media and Communication Studies Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (Routledge 2023) and Mediating Xenophobia In Africa (Palgrave 2020). He is editor of The Politics Of Laughter In The Social Media Age: Perspectives From The Global South (Palgrave Macmillan 2021) and Digital Humour In The COVID-19 Pandemic: Perspectives From The Global South (Palgrave Macmillan 2021).
