Butterfly Burning brings the brilliantly poetic voice of Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera to American readers for the first time. Set in Makokoba, a black township, in the late l940s, the novel is an intensely bittersweet love story. When Fumbatha, a construction worker, meets the much younger Phephelaphi, he"wants her like the land beneath his feet from which birth had severed him." He in turn fills her "with hope larger than memory." But Phephelaphi is not satisfied with their "one-room" love alone. The qualities that drew Fumbatha to her, her sense of independence and freedom, end up separating them. And the closely woven fabric of township life, where everyone knows everyone else, has a mesh too tight and too intricate to allow her to escape her circumstances on her own. Vera exploits language to peel away the skin of public and private lives. In Butterfly Burning she captures the ebullience and the bitterness of township life, as well as the strength and courage of her unforgettable heroine.

Yvonne Vera's Nehanda (1993) signalled the presence of a new and remarkable writer. Four subsequent novels have confirmed that she was the most important African novelist to emerge during the 1990s. Critics from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Britain, the Caribbean and the United States demonstrate through a diversity of theoretical approaches the originality of her work. Yvonne Vera's dense and poetic writing records public and private experiences of moments in Zimbabwe's history through the consciousness of her central women characters. What sets her apart from most authors is her ability to handle the most difficult subjects and confront taboos. North America: African Books Collective; Zimbabwe: Weaver Press

Women, especially leaders, holding tête-à-têtes with men to address political impasses have been recognized as shrewd, double headed, or witchlike distinctions that link them with juju or extraordinary, survivalist powers. Juju Fission: Women's Alternative Fictions from the Sahara, the Kalahari, and the Oases In-Between is a theoretical and analytical book on African women writers that focuses on seven representative novels from different parts of Africa: Bessie Head's Maru (South Africa/Botswana); Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero (Egypt); Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy; or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint and Changes (Ghana); Assia Djebar's A Sister to Scheherazade (Algeria); Calixthe Beyala's The Sun Hath Looked Upon Me (Cameroon); and Yvonne Vera's Nehanda (Zimbabwe). In her analysis, Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi demonstrates how women are viewed and how they operate in critical times. Ogunyemi explains how the heritage is passed on, in spite of dire situations emanating from colonialism, postcolonialism, ethnicism, sexism, and grinding poverty. An important contribution to many fields, Juju Fission is excellent background material for courses on African studies, women's studies, African Diaspora studies, black studies, global studies, and general literature studies.

The articles investigate representations in literature, both by the colonizers and colonized. Many deal with the effect the dominant culture had on the self image of native inhabitants. They cover areas on all continents that were colonized by European countries.

Discusses the history of Zimbabwe, including marriage, family, gender roles, and the influences of Western traditions on the cultures and customs of Zimbabwe.

A unique and stylish contribution to the social history of African cities and Zimbabwean cultural life.

This volume brings a variety of new approaches and contexts to modem and contemporary women's writing. Contributors include both new and well-established scholars from Europe, Australia, the USA , and the Caribbean. Their essays draw on, adapt, and challenge anthropological perspectives on rites of passage derived from the work of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. Collectively, the essays suggest that women's writing and women's experiences from diverse cultures go beyond any straightforward notion of a threefold structure of separation, transition, and incorporation. Some essays include discussion of traditional rites of passage such as birth, motherhood, marriage, death, and bereavement; others are interested in exploring less traditional, more fluid, and/or problematic rites such as abortion, living with HI V/AIDS, and coming into political consciousness. Contributors seek ways of linking writing on rites of passage to feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic theories which foreground margins, borders, and the outsider. The three opening essays explore the work of the Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera, whose groundbreaking work explored taboo subjects such as infanticide and incest. A wide range of other essays focus on writers from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe. including Jean Rhys, Bharati Mukherjee, Arundhati Roy, Jean Arasanayagam, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, and Eva Sallis. Rites of Passage in Postcolonial Women's Writing will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of postcolonial and modern and contemporary women's writing, and to students on literature and women's studies courses who want to study women's writing from a cross-cultural perspective and from different theoretical positions. Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo is Head of Humanities at Sheffield Hallam University. Her research focus is on African literature (particularly Zimbabwean), contemporary women's writing, and postcolonial cinemas. Gina Wisker is Professor of Higher Education and Contemporary Literature at the University of Brighton, where she teaches literature, is the head of the centre for learning and teaching, and pursues her research interests in postcolonial women's writing.

In The Objects of Life in Central Africa the history of consumption and social change from 1840 until 1980 is explored. By looking at the socio-economic, political and cultural meaning and impact of goods the contributions reassess Central African history

Literary representations of the body from Africa as well as narrative strategies of writing the body have only recently begun to receive wider critical attention. The reflections on body, sexuality, and gender in African literary texts brought together in this volume do not consider these three terms as separate entities but instead as closely related to each other, each term questioning the other: bodies and sexualities that are transgressing concepts of gender, gender that is probing body and sexuality. With regard to Africa, the three concepts form a particularly contested space, because body and sexuality are not only subjected to power relations in terms of gender, but also in terms of race, ethnicity, and the legacy of colonialism.While the sections “Gifted Bodies” and “Queered Bodies” show new developments in viewing body and sexuality as creative powers, the sections “Tainted Bodies” and “Violated Bodies” comprise essays that investigate the exposure of the body to physical aggression and other traumatic experiences.Some of the authors treated in detail are: Ama Ata Aidoo, Mariama Bâ, Calixthe Beyala, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Bessie Head, Sheila Kohler, Flora Nwapa, Promise Okekwe, Yvonne Vera; André Brink, J.M. Coetzee, K. Sello Duiker, Nuruddin Farah, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Dambudzo Marechera, Arthur Nortje, Ben Okri, Shamim Sarif, and Williams Sassine.Contributors: Akachi Adimora--Ezeigbo, Susan Arndt, Unoma N. Azuah, Elleke Boehmer, Monica Bungaro, Lucy Valerie Graham, Jessica Hemmings, Sigrid G. Köhler, Martina Kopf, Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, Marion Pape, Robert Muponde, Sarah Nuttall, Drew Shaw, Alioune Sow, Cheryl Stobie, Alexie Tcheuyap

Since the second half of the twentieth century, no single phenomenon has marred the image and development of Africa more than senseless fratricidal wars which rapidly followed the political independence of nations. This issue of African Literature Today is devoted to studies of how African writers, as historical witnesses, have handled the recreation of war as a cataclysmic phenomenon in various locations on the continent. The contributors explore the subject from a variety of perspectives: panoramic, regional, national and through comparative studies. War has enriched contemporary African literature, but at what price to human lives, peace and the environment? ERNEST EMENYONU is Professor of the Department of Africana Studies University of Michigan-Flint. The contributors include: CHIMALUM NWANKWO, CHRISTINE MATZKE, CLEMENT A. OKAFOR, INIBONG I. UKO, OIKE MACHIKO, SOPHIE OGWUDE, MAURICE TAONEZVI VAMBE, ZOE NORRIDGE and ISIDORE DIALA. Nigeria: HEBN

This book addresses the ways in which writers deploy the trope of contested criminality to expose Zimbabwe's socially and politically oppressive cultures in a wide range of novels and short stories published in English between 1994 and 2016. Some of the most influential authors that are examined in this book are Yvonne Vera, Petina Gappah, NoViolet Bulawayo, Brian Chikwava, Christopher Mlalazi, Tendai Huchu and Virginia Phiri. The author uses the Zimbabwean experience to engage with critical issues facing the African continent and the world, providing a thoughtful reading of contemporary debates on illegal migration, homophobia, state criminality and gender inequalities. The thematic focus of the book represents a departure from what Schulze-Engler notes elsewhere as postcolonial discourse’s habit of suggesting that the legacies of colonialism and the predominance of the ‘global North’ are responsible for injustice in the Global South. Using the context of Zimbabwe, it is shown that colonialism is not the only image of violence and injustice, but that there are other forms of injustice that are of local origin. Throughout the book, it is argued that in speaking about contested criminalities, writers call attention to the fact that laws are violated, some laws are unjust and some crimes are henceforth justified. In this sense crime, (in)justice and the law are portrayed as unstable concepts.

Focusing on texts from the late 1970s to the 1990s which document both changing attitudes to terminations of pregnancy and dramatic environmental, medical, and socio-political developments during southern Africa's liberation struggles, this book examines how four writers from Botswana, South Africa, and Zimbabwe address the ethics of abortion and reproductive choice. Viewing recent fiction through the lens of new materialist theory – which challenges conventional, individual-based notions of human rights by asserting that all matter holds agency – this book argues that southern African women writers anticipate and exceed current feminist revivals of materialist thought. Not only do the authors question contemporary discourse framing abortion as either a confirmation of a woman's 'right to choose' or an unethical termination of human life, but they challenge conventional understandings of development, growth, and time. Through close readings of both literal gestation in the selected texts and the metaphorical reproduction of the post/colonial nation, this study advances the concept of reproductive agency, creating a range of queer ecocritical alternatives to tropes such as those of 'the Mother Country', 'Mother Africa', or 'the birth of a nation'. This study situates abortion narratives by Wilma Stockenström (translated by J. M. Coetzee), Zoë Wicomb, Yvonne Vera, and Bessie Head alongside contemporary postcolonial feminist theories, melding traditional beliefs with materialist views to reconsider the future of reproductive health matters in southern Africa. Merging queer ecocritical perspectives from materialism and postcolonialism, this study will appeal to students and researchers in the medical humanities, new materialisms, and postcolonial studies.

This collection of essays on Zimbabwean literature brings together studies of both Rhodesian and Zimbabwean literature, spanning different languages and genres. It charts the at times painful process of the evolution of Rhodesian/ Zimbabwean identities that was shaped by pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial realities. The hybrid nature of the society emerges as different writers endeavour to make sense of their world. Two essays focus on the literature of the white settler. The first distils the essence of white settlers' alienation from the Africa they purport to civilize, revealing the delusional fixations of the racist mindset that permeates the discourse of the "white man's burden" in imperial narratives. The second takes up the theme of alienation found in settler discourse, showing how the collapse of the white supremacists' dream when southern African countries gained independence left many settlers caught up in a profound identity crisis. Four essays are devoted to Ndebele writing. They focus on the praise poetry composed for kings Mzilikazi and Lobengula; the preponderance of historical themes in Ndebele literature; the dilemma that lies at the heart of the modern Ndebele identity; and the fossilized views on gender roles found in the works of leading Ndebele novelists, both female and male. The essays on English-language writing chart the predominantly negative view of women found in the fiction of Stanley Nyamfukudza, assess the destabilization of masculine identities in post-colonial Zimbabwe, evaluate the complex vision of life and "reality" in Charles Mungoshi's short stories as exemplified in the tragic isolation of many of his protagonists, and explore Dambudzo Marechera's obsession with isolated, threatened individuals in his hitherto generally neglected dramas. The development of Shona writing is surveyed in two articles: the first traces its development from its origins as a colonial educational tool to the more critical works of the post-1980 independence phase; the second turns the spotlight on written drama from 1968 when plays seemed divorced from the everyday realities of people's lives to more recent work which engages with corruption and the perversion of the moral order. The volume also includes an illuminating interview with Irene Staunton, the former publisher of Baobab Books and now of Weaver Press.

This book brings together a complete set of approaches to works by female authors that articulate the black Atlantic in relation to the interplay of race, class, and gender. The chapters provide the grounds to (en)gender a more complex understanding of the scattered geographies of the African diaspora in the Atlantic basin. The variety of approaches displayed bears witness to the vitality of a field that, over the years, has become a diasporic formation itself as it incorporates critical insights and theoretical frameworks from multiple disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, thus exposing the manifold character of (black) diasporic interconnections within and beyond the Atlantic. Focusing on a wide array of contemporary literary and performance texts by women writers and performers from diverse locations including the Caribbean, Canada, Africa, the US, and the UK, chapters visit genres such as performance art, the novel, science fiction, short stories, and music. For these purposes, the volume is organized around two significant dimensions of diasporas: on the one hand, the material—corporeal and spatial—locations where those displacements associated with travel and exile occur, and, on the other, the fluid environments and networks that connect distant places, cultures, and times. This collection explores the ways in which women of African descent shape the cultures and histories in the modern, colonial, and postcolonial Atlantic worlds.

Through examination of the functions of language and cross-cultural readings of literature - from African queer reading to postcolonial Shakespeare - Rooney explores current ideas of performativity in literature and language, and negotiates a path between feminist theory?s common pitfalls of essentialism and constructivism.

Gender studies in Zimbabwe have tended to focus on women and their comparative disadvantages and under-privilege. Assuming a broader perspective is necessary at a time when society has grown used to arguments rooted in binaries: colonised and coloniser, race and class, sex and gender, poverty and wealth, patriotism and terrorism, etc. The editors of Manning the Nation recognise that concepts of manhood can be used to repress or liberate, and will depend on historical and political imperatives; they seek to introduce a more nuanced perspective to the interconnectivity of patriarchy, masculinity, the nation, and its image. The essays in this volume come from well-respected academics working in a variety of fields. The ideals and concepts of manhood are examined as they are reflected in important Zimbabwean literary texts. However, if literature provides a rich vein for the analysis of masculinities, what makes this collection so interesting is the interplay of literary analysis with chapters that provide a critical examination of the ways in which ideals of manhood have been employed in, for example, leadership and the nation, as a justification for violent engagement, in the field of AIDS and HIV, etc. Manning the Nation: Father figures in Zimbabwean literature and society sets the stage for a fresh and engaging discourse essential at a time when new paradigms are needed.