Contested Liberations, Transitions and the Crisis in Zimbabwe: Encounters with Post-colonial (Counter)Cultures (2000-2020)(48 African Social Studies Series)

How and when does culture enter the discourse on liberation, transition and crisis in an African post-colony such as Zimbabwe? In a deeply polarised nation reeling from a difficult transition and an unrelenting economic crisis, it is increasingly becoming difficult for the ZANU PF regime to prescribe and enforce its monolithic concept of liberation. This book culls, from contemporary (counter)cultures of liberation and transition, the state of liberations in Zimbabwe. It explores how culture has functioned as a complex site where rigid state-authored liberations are legitimated and naturalised but also where they are negotiated, contested and subverted.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: the Crisis of Liberation and Contested Transitions in Zimbabwe  1 Liberation and (Counter)Cultures of Liberations  2 Context: beyond Political and Politicised Liberations  3 Some Notes on Cultures and Countercultures of the Zimbabwean Crisis  4 The Zimbabwean Crisis  5 ‘Patriotic’ Countercultures of Liberation: Speaking Back to Opposition 18  6 The 2017 Coup: Ambiguous Transitions and the Politics of Liberation from Liberation  7 Outline of Chapters 2 (De-)limiting Gender and Sexuality: Queering Liberation in a Conservative Culture  1 (De)limiting Sexualities: the Cultural Politics of ‘unliberating’ Gender in Zimbabwe  2 Queer Liberations, Cultural Hegemony and Ambiguous Democratic Dispensations  3 “[T]he Court of the People”? Hate Speech and the Fear of Queerness in Popular Culture  4 Revising the Sexuality of Citizenship  5 Micro-Celebrities and Emancipatory Discourses of Recognition  6 Performing Rogue: Re-mattering the Transed Body in Virtual Public Spheres 3 Expatriated Liberations: Re-living a Settler Nation in Memory in Rhodesians Worldwide Contact Magazine  1 “Rhodesians Worldwide”: Re-living (in) a Settler Nation in Memory  2 “Orphans of the empire”? Post-Nation Rhodesians and Neo-Rhodesian Particularism  3 Loss, Neo-Rhodesian Melancholia and the Colonial Encounter as ‘achievement’  4 Strategies of Becoming Neo-Rhodesia: Re-presenting the Rhodesian Military  5 Conclusion 4 Liberating Liberation: Language, Power and the Politics of the 2017 Militarised ‘transition’  1 “The Current Purging … Must Stop Forthwith”: the Political Context  2 Politics in Grammars of Mis/Recognition  3 Revising and Re-visioning Patriotic History in Chiwenga’s ‘coup speech’  4 “We are only targeting criminals around him”? Language and the Discursive Politics of Engendering Transition in Moyo’s Coup Speech  5 The Discursive Politics of Fear in Lieutenant General Moyo’s Coup Speech  6 Conclusion 5 “Mother of our nation”: the First Lady and Gendered Politics of Zimbabwean Dispensations  1 Auxillia Mnangagwa, Difference and the New Politics of Care  2 The Temporality of Power: Social Media, the First Lady and Spectacles of New Care  3 Unbecoming Grace Mugabe: Social Media and Auxillia Mnangagwa’s Redemptive Humility  4 Christian Amaihood, Politics and the ‘new’ Moral Ethic of Care  5 Cultures of Humility: the Political Economy of Auxillia Mnangagwa’s Visualised Ordinariness 6 Revis(ion)ing Transition: Douglas Rogers’s Two Weeks in November and the Politics of Witnessing the Zimbabwean Coup  1 The “white man’s burden”? Rogers and the Politics of Writing Zimbabwe While White  2 Rogers, Two Weeks and the ‘truth’ of Non-Fiction  3 When the Event Story Becomes the Human Story  4 Tom Ellis and the Expatriated Coup: Carving Space for White Heroism in the Zimbabwean Transition  5 “All I want is good governance”: the Moral Pull of Zimbabwe’s “second independence”  6 Unusual Alliances, Foils of History and the Narrative Legitimation of the Coup  7 Conclusion 7 Mugabe, Liberation and the Necropolitics of His Death and Burial  1 “the man-nation”: Mugabe and Mugabeism in Life and Death  2 Memorialising Mugabe: History, Politics, Places and Spaces  3 Monumenting Mugabe: Funerary Hagiographies and the Political Semiotics of the Mausoleum  4 ‘Body’ Politics and Semiotics  5 A Flagging Nationalism and State Negotiations of Mugabe’s Haunting Corpse  6 Wafa Wanaka: Settling Mugabe, (un)Settling (il)Legitimacy  7 Conclusion: (de)Stabilising Public (Counter)Memories of Mugabe 8 Conclusion Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Oliver Nyambi, PhD (2013), is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of the Free State in South Africa. He has published monographs, edited books and many articles on the Zimbabwean crisis, African literature and onomastics. His latest monograph is Life-writing from the Margins in Zimbabwe (Routledge, 2019).