Browsing by Author "Mapanzure, Rangarirayi"
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Item 'Visions of land in the poetry of Chenjerai Hove and Musaemura Zimunya"(2014-01-20) Mapanzure, RangarirayiLand occupies a special position in the history of Zimbabwe and the African continent in general. The research aims to critically examine the seemingly contradictory visions of land in Zimbabwean poetry. In their poetry, Musaemura Zimunya and Chenjerai Hove concoct startling images of the land or landscape in Zimbabwe. This forces one to not only gaze at the land or landscape but also engage with other broad issues related to literature and history. The research attempts to answer a number of questions. It discusses how history has shaped the Zimbabwean terrain and how this has been captured by the imaginative processes. The focus is on how land is depicted in Zimbabwean poetry and literature in general showing the overall significance of colonialism in this respect. It then examines in detail the poetry of the selected poets showing how each particular poet envisions the land. The poets seem to betray conflicting “structures of feeling”. The research explores the contentious issue of “demarcations” or “boundaries” of “country” and “city” focusing on the perceived conflicted relationship between the “two”. An attempt is then made to make alternative reading of the selected poets’ reading of the land. It is argued that the poets’ visions of landscape are in fact a rejection of the present and future, which may be seen as amounting to, in broad terms, an indictment of the postcolonial condition. The poetry evokes feelings and fantasies of escape from the land but ironically to the land which seems to fail to live up to the expectations.Item Writing dictatorship, rewriting African writing: mythology, temporality and power(2020) Mapanzure, RangarirayiAbstract This study explores the various representations of the dictator and the postcolonial condition in what can be termed the African dictator text. Adopting a panoramic approach that selects texts from several regions of Africa, the study critically examines the ambivalence and paradox of power, focusing on the various strategies devised and deployed by African writers to re-interpret and re-imagine postcolonial identities, time, space and authority in a globalised terrain, while arguing that the selected texts simultaneously entrench and destabilise content, form, views, attitudes, positions and meaning. The study also argues, in this respect, that the selected texts problematize representation of the performance of power as they reinforce, perpetuate and destabilise age-old but persistent stereo-typical notions of ‘exoticism’, ‘backwardness’ and the ‘dark continent’. This comes out through what the study sees as the collusion, tension and entanglement of myths, power and temporality which places the African and the continent in a completely different time-frame. The conclusion reached is that the dictator text continues to be an arena where African experiences are vigorously interrogated, re-interpreted and re-imagined, and in the process, the genre continues to spawn new and innovative strategies of representing the perennially confounding African postcolonial condition.