Contested Liberations, Transitions and the Crisis in Zimbabwe

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).

• Acknowledgments1 Introduction: the Crisis of Liberation and Contested Transitions in Zimbabwe1 Liberation and (Counter)Cultures of Liberations2 Context: beyond Political and Politicised Liberations3 Some Notes on Cultures and Countercultures of the Zimbabwean Crisis4 The Zimbabwean Crisis5 ‘Patriotic’ Countercultures of Liberation: Speaking Back to Opposition 186 The 2017 Coup: Ambiguous Transitions and the Politics of Liberation from Liberation7 Outline of Chapters2 (De-)limiting Gender and Sexuality: Queering Liberation in a Conservative Culture1 (De)limiting Sexualities: the Cultural Politics of ‘unliberating’ Gender in Zimbabwe2 Queer Liberations, Cultural Hegemony and Ambiguous Democratic Dispensations3 “[T]he Court of the People”? Hate Speech and the Fear of Queerness in Popular Culture4 Revising the Sexuality of Citizenship5 Micro-Celebrities and Emancipatory Discourses of Recognition6 Performing Rogue: Re-mattering the Transed Body in Virtual Public Spheres3 Expatriated Liberations: Re-living a Settler Nation in Memory in Rhodesians Worldwide Contact Magazine1 “Rhodesians Worldwide”: Re-living (in) a Settler Nation in Memory2 “Orphans of the empire”? Post-Nation Rhodesians and Neo-Rhodesian Particularism3 Loss, Neo-Rhodesian Melancholia and the Colonial Encounter as ‘achievement’4 Strategies of Becoming Neo-Rhodesia: Re-presenting the Rhodesian Military5 Conclusion4 Liberating Liberation: Language, Power and the Politics of the 2017 Militarised ‘transition’1 “The Current Purging … Must Stop Forthwith”: the Political Context2 Politics in Grammars of Mis/Recognition3 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 Speech5 The Discursive Politics of Fear in Lieutenant General Moyo’s Coup Speech6 Conclusion5 “Mother of our nation”: the First Lady and Gendered Politics of Zimbabwean Dispensations1 Auxillia Mnangagwa, Difference and the New Politics of Care2 The Temporality of Power: Social Media, the First Lady and Spectacles of New Care3 Unbecoming Grace Mugabe: Social Media and Auxillia Mnangagwa’s Redemptive Humility4 Christian Amaihood, Politics and the ‘new’ Moral Ethic of Care5 Cultures of Humility: the Political Economy of Auxillia Mnangagwa’s Visualised Ordinariness6 Revis(ion)ing Transition: Douglas Rogers’s Two Weeks in November and the Politics of Witnessing the Zimbabwean Coup1 The “white man’s burden”? Rogers and the Politics of Writing Zimbabwe While White2 Rogers, Two Weeks and the ‘truth’ of Non-Fiction3 When the Event Story Becomes the Human Story4 Tom Ellis and the Expatriated Coup: Carving Space for White Heroism in the Zimbabwean Transition5 “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 Coup7 Conclusion7 Mugabe, Liberation and the Necropolitics of His Death and Burial1 “the man-nation”: Mugabe and Mugabeism in Life and Death2 Memorialising Mugabe: History, Politics, Places and Spaces3 Monumenting Mugabe: Funerary Hagiographies and the Political Semiotics of the Mausoleum4 ‘Body’ Politics and Semiotics5 A Flagging Nationalism and State Negotiations of Mugabe’s Haunting Corpse6 Wafa Wanaka: Settling Mugabe, (un)Settling (il)Legitimacy7 Conclusion: (de)Stabilising Public (Counter)Memories of Mugabe8 ConclusionBibliographyIndex