‘Country and countryhood’: perspectives on the Zimbabwean nation-projects in NoViolet Bulawayo’s novels
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Country is a recurring metaphoric trope in NoViolet Bulawayo’s novels, Glory and We Need New Names, that layers multiple meanings of the nation as a post-colonial political project. This trope recurs in neo-nationalist discourses where competing constructions of progress in Zimbabwe pervade, for instance, the former President Mugabe’s personalising discourses of Zimbabwe as his, and the current President Mnangagwa’s linguistic constructs of post-Mugabe Zimbabwe as a Second Republic. In these uses, country is a politically yet aesthetically mobilising term whose political utility makes it a generative site for self-legitimation. The concept gets more troubling in denials of Zimbabwe’s countryhood by some of its citizens who perceive the country’s state of crisis since 2000 as a loss of the status of legitimate countryhood. Bulawayo’s novels evoke this notion of non-country in their problematization of hegemonic narratives of national progress. This aporia emanates from the contradictions in politicised constitutions of post-coloniality and progress that interject hegemonic constructions of country. Evidently, the concept of country animates numerous ideological valences. The question that we pose in this article is how do the focal texts reflect (on) the various iterations of country and non-country as conditions palimpsesting the trouble with post-coloniality in Zimbabwe?
Source: African Identities
Institution: University of the Free State
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4411635285