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This paper reflects upon two (un)related spectacular phenomena in South Africa: rape and black racism using Zukiswa Wanner’ London Cape Town Joburg (2014). It examines how the text uses irony to turn postapartheid optimism on its head, while refusing to uncritically borrow and use apartheid language of manufacturing difference. In addition, it makes connections between rape, intimacy and empathy in the contexts of sexual violence by examining the role of tactical empathy during the episodes of rape in the text. It concludes by suggesting that although empathy is an emotion for social good and transformation, it maybe co-opted and used to perpetuate uncanny/predatory masculinities and sexual violence on people perceived to be less privileged, weak and/or ‘deviant’. In addition, this work proffers that foregrounding vaginal discourses on discussions about rape in South Africa render other forms of sexual violence – male and anal rape – invisible/unthinkable.

Within postcolonial literary studies, questions of political commitment or individual identity often accompany aesthetic categorization: for instance, to what extent do an author’s stylistic choices reflect an individual or collective narrative of national struggle? Zimbabwean author Dambudzo Marechera’s fiction and essays disallow easy assignation as local or universal, African or Western. The vulgar, irreverent aesthetic of Marechera’s debut novella, The House of Hunger (1978), expanded the definition of postcolonial African writing and at times prompted his categorization as a cosmopolitan or global modernist author. Rather than considering his work as reflective of a hybrid identity, I argue that it proposes a coeval relationship between Western and African aesthetic and material worlds in the post-World War II era. Marechera enacts this historico-aesthetic relationship by representing 1970–80s Zimbabwe with violence and vulgarity. In turn, this representation confronts and subverts the colonial fashioning of Africa as outside history, modernity, and the universal. I read The House of Hunger as a theorization of this mesochronous relationship between Africa and the West.

This paper examines a number of African-authored narratives (novels and film) in the light of recent thinking about futurism and the role of speculative fiction as a means of envisioning the future. Uppinder Mehan, coeditor of the first ever anthology of “postcolonial science fiction and fantasy,” So Long Been Dreaming, notes that postcolonial writing has rarely “pondered that strange land of the future” and warns, “If we do not imagine our futures, postcolonial peoples risk being condemned to be spoken about and for again” (Mehan 270). Kodwo Eshun, in a seminal essay, expands on this to argue that, while the “practice of countermemory as . . . an ethical commitment to history, the dead and the forgotten” has traditionally relegated futurism to the sidelines of black creativity, this has been progressively challenged by “contemporary African artists . . . [for whom] understanding and intervening in the production and distribution of this dimension constitutes a chronopolitical act” (292). The paper proposes that this chronopolitical act (what in literature we now call speculative fiction) has its roots in African modes of storytelling that draw on myth, orality, and indigenous belief systems that lend themselves to the invention of personal mythologies, the rewriting of history in the light of future realities, and the use of extrarealist or magical phenomena as part of the everyday. Since these elements characterize many novels not thought of as speculative, this suggests that futurism has been a strain in African writing from its inception. The turn from mythic revisioning to speculative fiction as a distinct and recognizable genre in the 21st century has notably been embraced by women writers such as Nnedi Okorafor and Lauren Beukes, in whose work gender/femininity is a determinant in the projection of imagined futures. The paper examines how speculative narrative strategies in a range of texts are brought to bear on specific historical situations on the African continent (those characterized, for example, by genocide, civil war, cross-continental migration, urban dereliction, xenophobia, violence, and the occult) and the potential futures to which they point. The paper argues, therefore, that such narratives, rather than being relegated to the category of fantasy, deserve attention as key indicators of futuristic thinking.

This essay argues for a structuralist approach to reading the recurrence of formal, geographic, and epistemological schisms in the Zimbabwean novel from the 1970s through today. The essay makes this claim within a wider context of plurality's fetishization in African literary studies and postcolonial theory. Whereas the postcolonial-cum-global field tends to prioritize categorical expansiveness and dissolution in African writing, equating structural and conceptual more-than-oneness with pluralism of a clearly political expression, “Plurality in Question” suggests that a robust pluralist practice in fact demands categorical delineation and opposition. In this way, Zimbabwean writers' frequent reliance on binary oppositions becomes the starting point for theorizing an argumentative novel form, which responds to but may not directly reflect the pluralist commitments of lived imperial and/or nationalist politics. In the context of African literature specifically, the essay also offers a new through-line connecting key liberation-era fiction (e.g., Charles Mungoshi, Dambudzo Marechera) with some of its current transnational successor texts (e.g., NoViolet Bulawayo, Christopher Mlalazi).

This paper identifies and intervenes in the problems posed by reading postcolonial texts as representative, or encompassing of, the nation with which they are associated. Alternatively, it proposes that reading at the scale of the city offers a method for circumventing the elision of particularity which occurs when the nation, continent or globe are foregrounded in Western or Western-facing responses to these texts. The paper models what such a “scaled-down” reading might look like, attending to Dambudzo Marechera’s House of Hunger (1978) and Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait With Keys: Joburg and What-What (2006), and their intricate relationships to the urban spaces of Harare and Johannesburg, respectively. At stake in these analyses are opportunities to identify what Jacques Rancière terms dissensus, or political contestation, rendered in spatial terms. This establishes a pliable counterdiscourse of the city which seeks and discerns meaning not through consensus or “sanctioned representation”; but through the complexities of affective attachments, the plurality of experiences, and the teeming heterogeneity of physical and literary spaces that have been previously flattened.

The Bible, through faithful quotations and wider references, is central in the understanding of the literatures of Sub-Saharan Africa. The work of missionaries in the field of education during and after colonial times accounts for this phenomenon, which applies in both French speaking and English speaking areas. It is nonetheless essential to stress that the process, far from loyally mimicking the masters’ discourses, gives new meaning to the Bible and its derivative. Through the examples of Dambudzo Marechera and Tchicaya U Tam’si, this article aims at examining the tension thus created between the sacred and the secular. By considering these authors as readers of the Bible, we intend to grasp a better understanding of biblical quotations as instruments caught in a wider web of references. This use of quotations eventually leads to a mystical quest redefining the status of literary texts.

In a description of nationalist poems about “a golden age of black heroes; of myths and legends and sprites” (Marechera 74), the narrator of The House of Hunger (1978) observes that these themes are the “exposed veins dripping through the body of the poems.” In this article we extend this observation to argue that, metaphorically on display in Marechera’s novella itself, are the “exposed veins dripping through the body of the [text]” (74). The novella’s themes include colonialism, social destitution, violence, state-sanctioned oppression, identity struggles, poverty, dislocation, disillusionment and anger, all of which are appropriately imaged in Marechera’s visceral metaphor of the pain and violence implicit in the literary text. More specifically, corporeal imagery emphasises the unnamed narrator’s troubled existence, suffusing The House of Hunger in a manner that elicits disgust and horror, thus encouraging the reader’s affective response to the representation of the colonial condition. This article illuminates Marechera’s seeming obsession with corporeality by providing a postcolonial and psychoanalytic reading, focussing in particular on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection. Although critics have objected to reading African texts through the lens of psychoanalysis, the article sets out to address this concern, noting the importance of theorists like Frantz Fanon and Joshua D. Esty in justifying psychoanalytic readings of African literature, and drawing resonant parallels between Kristevan theory and Marechera’s perspective on the colonial condition of Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) in the 1970s.

In this debate concerning Marechera's Amelia love poems, Drew Shaw argues they are innovative, especially in their adaptation of the traditional European sonnet and their exploration of an intercultural love relationship. He commends Marechera's uncensored psychosexual investigation and his imaginative fusions of Western (Greco-Roman) mythology with late twentieth-century African realities. By contrast, John Eppel finds Marechera is not the innovative master of the English language he claims to be, at least not in this poetry. Identifying structural inadequacies, he argues there is little to distinguish it from plain prose. For Eppel, Marechera is archaically Eurocentric (in his use of metaphor, myth, and turn of phrase) to the detriment of his poetry. Shaw and Eppel clash on their choice of evaluative criteria and use significantly different interpretive methods, but converge to some extent in advocating close critical readings, which have long been neglected in studies of Marechera's poetry.

Habila discusses the life and works of Dambudzo Marechera, an African writer. Among other things, he says that Marechera is regarded as one of the most influential postcolonial African writers.

The growth of African literature in the postcolonial era has at times paralleled and imitated the social, political, cultural and economic processes on the continent. Indeed, most of the literatures written and published in the years after the 1960s reflect both the dynamism of modern free Africa and the continent's problems too. A number of earlier African writers such as Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi, Okello Oculi, Ama Ata Aidoo, Grace Ogot, Taban lo Liyong and Okot p'Bitek, to mention a few, enthusiastically introduced African literature to the rest of the world in a language of optimism. However, events in the subsequent years have bedevilled Africa with natural and man-made disasters which have destabilized and unsettled the continent. New voices, such as Nurrudin Farah, Ben Okri, Dambudzo Marechera, and Yvonne Vera among others, continued the tradition of re-telling the African story but in new tongues. This essay argues that the fiction of Ben Okri and Dambudzo Marechera proposes re-directions in the character of African literature. I argue that the two writers are illustrative of a new crop of African authors whose works grapple with African reality in the latter decades of the 20th century Africa, in new and inventive styles and grammars. Adapted from the source document.