Gibson Ncube
Biographic Data
| ID | 210895 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gibson Ncube |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gibson |
| FAMILY NAME | Ncube |
| SIGNATURE | NCUBE G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stellenbosch University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6351-6114 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 49 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
“ Ukugudlisa ” (When the Unsayable Is Said Indirectly): Proverbs and the Regulation of Male Singleness and Childlessness Among the Ndebele of Zimbabwe
Male singleness and childlessness are sensitive issues in many patriarchal societies because they unsettle the idea that men have the sole responsibility of securing lineage. They also challenge forms of masculine authority that are tied to reproduction and marital status. Single and childless men, whether through choice or other reasons, deviate from normative pathways, and their identities often become sites of cultural anxiety and moral scruti…
Waste and wastage: The danger of men who choose to remain unmarried and childless in Zimbabwe
Le rebelle inébranlable: Le legs de Dambudzo Marechera au Zimbabwe et au-delà
Frictions, traces, and relationalities: Reimagining queer African experiences
Edible Bodies? Conspicuous Consumption, Women's Bodies and Postcolonial Masculinities in Fast-Food Advertisements in Zimbabwe
While existing scholarship has primarily focused on examining how women are often objectified and sexualised in fast-food marketing advertisements, this article shifts the focus to demonstrate how such advertisements reveal the construction, performance and negotiation of precarious masculinities. By concentrating on advertisements from a Zimbabwean fast-food chain, Mambo's Chicken, this article argues that advertisements framing women as edible …
Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives: By Polo B. Moji, New York, Routledge, 2022, 182 pp
L’ouvrage de Polo Moji intitulé Gender and the Spatiality of Blackness in Contemporary AfroFrench Narratives (2022) est une contribution novatrice et importante à la recherche sur les littératures
Literary Texts as Sites of Alternative Memorialisation, Memory-Making and Archive-Making
African SF: An Introduction
Embodying Time and Futurity in the Short Stories of Tendai Huchu and Temitayo Olofinlua
One of the defining features of sf, Africanfuturism included, is the depiction of the relationship between embodiment and time. This article examines two short stories, "Egoli" by Zimbabwean writer Tendai Huchu (2020) and "The Last Brown Roof" by Nigerian author Temitayo Olofinlua (2022). This article demonstrates how the stories examine the ways in which past, present, and future are interrelated, melt into each other, and form a seamless tempor…
What is the place of African languages in knowledge production? [South African Journal of African Languages]
Despite their vast potential, African languages are often marginalised in the knowledge production ecosystem. This article explores the multifaceted roles African languages could play not just in shaping and preserving indigenous knowledge systems and fostering cultural identities but also in being languages of science and communication of science. By examining the complex dynamics of the hierarchisation of languages within the knowledge producti…
Images sur l'Afrique, images d'Afrique: By Frédérique Louveau, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2023, 237pp
Dans son essai satirique “How to write about Africa,” Binyavanga Wainaina critique les représentations occidentales de l’Afrique. Il remet en question les clichés tels que les enfants affamés, les
This is Improper and Irreligious: Navigation of Queer Sexuality, Religion, and Practice in Marwan Hamed’s Film Imarat Yácubyan and Abdellah Taïa’s Novel Une Mélancolie Arabe
This article examines the negotiation of queer sexuality in Arab-Muslim societies of North Africa. Through close analysis and reading of the film Imarat Yácubyan by Marwan Hamed (Egypt) and the novel Une Mélancolie Arabe by Abdellah Taïa (Morocco), this article examines how media makes it possible to understand how Muslims in North Africa negotiate their sexuality, religion, and practice against backgrounds in which queerness exists in silence an…
Scripting Identities: Reading Language Dynamics and Ideologies on Shop Signs in Kampala
This article examines the linguistic landscape of Kampala (Uganda) by analysing the language dynamics that play out through shop signs. Engaging with data collected through photographs and interviews, this article draws on three interrelated theoretical perspectives: the markedness of languages, the symbolic power of languages, and good reasons for language use. The main findings suggest that the languages used on shop signs in Uganda are informe…
Making sense of that ‘moment of madness’: Virtual discussion of Gukurahundi on social media in Zimbabwe
Queer(ing) freedom: Rewriting coming-out narratives in contemporary Maghrebian literary production
This article analyses how contemporary writers of Maghrebian descent make use of autofiction to make visible queer desires and sexualities which exist in a perpetual state of marginalization. Using autofiction, a genre of literary expression which has been popular in the Francophone world in the past two decades, writers like Abdellah Taïa, Rachid O., and Nina Bouraoui complicate the idea of coming out. Although it might appear as though they are…
Queer, Christian and Afrikaans: The libidinal, sexuality and religion in Kanarie and Skeef
Religion is often viewed as incompatible with queer sexualities and genders. In the Afrikaans-speaking communities of South Africa, Calvinist doctrine and dogma have been used to marginalise and ostracise those sexual and gender identities that stray from the heteronormative scripts sanctioned by cultural and religious practices. In this article, I examine how the libidinal is central to the way in which queer and faith communities interact in Af…
Sexual Humour in Africa: Gender, Jokes, and Societal Change (Ignatius Chukwumah, ed.)
Tydskrif vir Letterkunde is an online, peer-reviewed, accredited scholarly journal which publishes original, previously unpublished research and overview articles on theoretical, applied or comparative aspects of African literatures and cultural practices
Queer African Cinemas (Lindsey B. Green-Simms)
Tydskrif vir Letterkunde is an online, peer-reviewed, accredited scholarly journal which publishes original, previously unpublished research and overview articles on theoretical, applied or comparative aspects of African literatures and cultural practices
Abdellah Taïa and an Emergent Queer African Islamic Discourse: Texts, Visibility and Intimate Archives
This article discusses the work of Abdellah Taïa, the first openly gay Moroccan novelist to write his queerness, as a major contribution to an emergent queer African Islamic discourse. Bringing Taïa’s work into conversation with diverse literary texts from elsewhere on the continent, the article makes two major interventions in the field of queer African studies. First, it centres Islam as a resource for queer agency, creativity and subjectivity …
Cultures of Change in Contemporary Zimbabwe: Socio-Political Transition from Mugabe to Mnangagwa
Film as /and Popular Social Text: The Reception of John Trengove’s Inxeba/The Wound and Wanuri Kahui’s Rafiki
This article is interested in popular and institutional or state responses to the representations of queerness offered in the films Inxeba/The Wound (South Africa, 2017) and Rafiki (Kenya, 2018). Aside from portraying the marked homophobia that continues to circulate on the African continent, the institutional and state responses to the films have overshadowed the positive popular reception which has characterised conversations around the films o…
Women and North African Literatures
The Zimbabwean Crisis after Mugabe: Multidisciplinary Perspectives
Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora (Keguro Macharia)
Tydskrif vir Letterkunde is an online, peer-reviewed, accredited scholarly journal which publishes original, previously unpublished research and overview articles on theoretical, applied or comparative aspects of African literatures and cultural practices
Skin and Silence in Selected Maghrebian Queer Films
The main premise of this article is that Maghreb cinema cannot openly represent queerness. Nadia El Fani's Bedwin Hacker (2003), Raja Amari's Al Dowaha (Buried Secrets) (2009) and Abdellah Taïa's L’Armée du Salut (The Salvation Army) (2013) represent queerness as muted, silent and secret, performed in darkness and shadowy spaces. Drawing on cultural theories of the significance of skin, I argue that in the selected films, skin and silence are exp…
(Re)membering the nation’s “forgotten” past: Portrayals of Gukurahundi in Zimbabwean literature
In the early 1980s Zimbabwe witnessed an ethnic cleansing which has been ignored in official state discourses and rendered unspeakable. This “moment of madness” (Ellis, 2006: 40), as Robert Mugabe called it, has come to be referred to as Gukurahundi. The minority Ndebele tribe was persecuted by government-backed forces. This article draws on the theoretical reflections of El Nossery and Hubbell who argue that even though some traumatic experience…
Eternal mothers, whores or witches: The oddities of being a woman in politics in Zimbabwe
In the country where I come from, Zimbabwe, participation in politics and decision-making is very much a masculine affair. Women occupy peripheral positions in which they are expected not to decentre male dominance. Through cultural practices inflated with religious beliefs, women have often been relegated to the domestic space of the home in which their agency is reduced to executing banal household chores. Positionally, as a male academic, I am…
Mugabe's fall from grace: Satire and fictional narratives as silent forms of resistance in/on Zimbabwe
Zimbabwean state media has been known to portray the long-serving President as a superhuman who has remained unscathed by the ravages of age. Rumours of his failing health have often been downplayed by narratives of him being as “fit as a fiddle.” This myth of the indefatigable Mugabe was dealt a blow when in February 2015 he fell to the ground in full public view upon his return from an African Union meeting in Ethiopia where he had been named c…
Compelled to Perform in the 'Oppressor's' Language? Ndebele Performing Artists and Zimbabwe's Shona-Centric Habitus
This article discusses how the deep-rooted Shona hegemony across all fields of cultural practice in Zimbabwe has compelled some Ndebele arts performers to use Shona language in order to appeal culturally to a Shona audience. Ndebele performing artists have been marginalised if they have not produced artistic works that align themselves with Shona-oriented world views. Primarily using a Bourdieu-inspired theoretical framework, we expose Zimbabwe’s…
Skin and Silence in Selected Maghrebian Queer Films
The main premise of this article is that Maghreb cinema cannot openly represent queerness. Nadia El Fani's Bedwin Hacker (2003), Raja Amari's Al Dowaha (Buried Secrets) (2009) and Abdellah Taïa's L’Armée du Salut (The Salvation Army) (2013) represent queerness as muted, silent and secret, performed in darkness and shadowy spaces. Drawing on cultural theories of the significance of skin, I argue that in the selected films, skin and silence are exp…
Sexual/textual politics: Rethinking gender and sexuality in gay Moroccan literature
This paper sets out to examine the social implications and functions of the contemporary body of gay Moroccan literature against Maria Pia Lara's readings of the creation and reception of literary works in the public sphere. Through a (re)reading of novels by Rachid O. and Abdellah Taïa, it is argued that these novels offer a privileged space that is not simply a metalinguistic and autonomous edifice, but also a means through which individual, so…
Edible Bodies? Conspicuous Consumption, Women's Bodies and Postcolonial Masculinities in Fast-Food Advertisements in Zimbabwe
While existing scholarship has primarily focused on examining how women are often objectified and sexualised in fast-food marketing advertisements, this article shifts the focus to demonstrate how such advertisements reveal the construction, performance and negotiation of precarious masculinities. By concentrating on advertisements from a Zimbabwean fast-food chain, Mambo's Chicken, this article argues that advertisements framing women as edible …
Queer(ing) freedom: Rewriting coming-out narratives in contemporary Maghrebian literary production
This article analyses how contemporary writers of Maghrebian descent make use of autofiction to make visible queer desires and sexualities which exist in a perpetual state of marginalization. Using autofiction, a genre of literary expression which has been popular in the Francophone world in the past two decades, writers like Abdellah Taïa, Rachid O., and Nina Bouraoui complicate the idea of coming out. Although it might appear as though they are…
Abdellah Taïa and an Emergent Queer African Islamic Discourse: Texts, Visibility and Intimate Archives
This article discusses the work of Abdellah Taïa, the first openly gay Moroccan novelist to write his queerness, as a major contribution to an emergent queer African Islamic discourse. Bringing Taïa’s work into conversation with diverse literary texts from elsewhere on the continent, the article makes two major interventions in the field of queer African studies. First, it centres Islam as a resource for queer agency, creativity and subjectivity …
Human Beings Have a Hard Time Relating to That Which Does Not Resemble Them”: Queering Normativity in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon
In this article, I analyse the ways in which Nnedi Okorafor's Afrofuturist novel Lagoon (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2014) challenges stable and so-called normative identities and ways of being. Lagoon narrates the story of aliens landing in Lagos, Nigeria. Through its presentation of shapeshifting aliens, as well as the use of a plurivocal narrative technique enmeshed with Nigerian folktales and myths, the novel destabilises the notions of stabl…
Of dirt, disinfection and purgation: Discursive construction of state violence in selected contemporary Zimbabwean literature
This paper examines post-independent Zimbabwean literary narratives which engage with how the ruling ZANU-PF government frames dissenting voices as constituting dirt, filth and undesirability. Making use of Achille Mbembe's postulations on the "vulgarity of power" and Kenneth W. Harrow's readings of the politics of dirt, the central thesis of this paper is that the troping of dirt and state sponsored violence are closely related to the themes of …
The festering finger?” Reimagining Minority Sexuality in Tendai Huchu's The Hairdresser of Harare and Abdellah Taïa's Une Mélancolie Arabe
Tendai Huchu's The Hairdresser of Harare and Une Mélancolie Arabe by Moroccan Abdellah Taïa explore minority sexuality against overtly homophobic backdrops in contemporary African contexts. This article initially problematises minority sexuality in Africa before considering the stylistic and narratological techniques employed by both writers to depict the quest by their gay protagonists in assuming their homosexuality. By centring on gay characte…
A Bantu in My Bathroom: Debating Race, Sexuality, and Other Uncomfortable South African Topics
Eusebius McKaiser, Johannesburg, Bookstorm & Pan Macmillan South Africa, 2012, 208 pp. (pbk) 978-1-920434-37-3 A decade or so before the birth of the modern postapartheid, democratic, and multiraci
Dieu et le sexe. Le pur et l’impur’: Concilier l’Islam et l’homosexualité chez Rachid O. et Abdellah Taïa
Although homosexuality is palpably present in Arab-Muslim societies of the Maghreb, there is nonetheless intolerance of their open discussion. Even on a purely discursive level, taboo remains an insurmountable hurdle. The present study attempts to contribute to growing debate and interest in various aspects and potential common points between literary production and ‘marginal’ sexuality in Francophone North Africa. This article problematizes homo…
Sexual/textual politics: Rethinking gender and sexuality in gay Moroccan literature
This paper sets out to examine the social implications and functions of the contemporary body of gay Moroccan literature against Maria Pia Lara's readings of the creation and reception of literary works in the public sphere. Through a (re)reading of novels by Rachid O. and Abdellah Taïa, it is argued that these novels offer a privileged space that is not simply a metalinguistic and autonomous edifice, but also a means through which individual, so…
To be black, Christian and gay: Nakhane Touré’s Brave Confusion
Released in 2013, Nakhane Touré’s debut album, Brave Confusion, is innovative in grappling with questions of race, sexuality and religion. Enveloped in a beguiling honesty and replete with layers of complexity, this album captures the arduous journey towards the acceptation of a gay identity. Drawing on the theoretical work proposed by Judith Butler in her essay, “Critically queer”, this paper argues that music offers a space that allows Touré to…
(Re)membering the nation’s “forgotten” past: Portrayals of Gukurahundi in Zimbabwean literature
In the early 1980s Zimbabwe witnessed an ethnic cleansing which has been ignored in official state discourses and rendered unspeakable. This “moment of madness” (Ellis, 2006: 40), as Robert Mugabe called it, has come to be referred to as Gukurahundi. The minority Ndebele tribe was persecuted by government-backed forces. This article draws on the theoretical reflections of El Nossery and Hubbell who argue that even though some traumatic experience…
Mugabe's fall from grace: Satire and fictional narratives as silent forms of resistance in/on Zimbabwe
Zimbabwean state media has been known to portray the long-serving President as a superhuman who has remained unscathed by the ravages of age. Rumours of his failing health have often been downplayed by narratives of him being as “fit as a fiddle.” This myth of the indefatigable Mugabe was dealt a blow when in February 2015 he fell to the ground in full public view upon his return from an African Union meeting in Ethiopia where he had been named c…
Deconstructing the closet: A sociological reading of Tendai Huchu’s novel, The Hairdresser of Harare
In Zimbabwe, minority sexualities remain largely concealed or closeted due to the combined effect of religious fervour, homophobia and conservative traditional beliefs. Through a close reading of Tendai Huchu’s novel, The hairdresser of Harare (2010), which portrays a gay protagonist grappling with his sexual identity in modern-day Harare, this article analyses how various ways of construing homosexuality shape the self-understanding of the cultu…
Knowledge, Power and Being: Literature and the Creation of an Archive of “Marginal” Sexualities in the Maghreb
This article analyses the role of literature in creating knowledge and an archive of “marginal” sexuality in the Maghreb. Cultural and religious discourses have functioned in a manner that has not only marginalised non-normative sexuality but, more importantly, rendered them invisible. The bourgeoning body of literary works that have dared to break the silence on such sexuality has played a pivotal role in establishing a significant archive of th…
Outspoken Cynics? Rethinking the Social Consciousness of Rap and Hip-Hop Music in Zimbabwe
Rap and hip-hop are often characterised as musical genres replete with foul language, hyper-masculinity, misogyny, violence and egocentrism. The music of two Zimbabwean rappers Outspoken Tha Humble Neophyte (Tongai Leslie Makawa) and Synik (Gerald Mugwenhi) differs considerably from this stereotypical perception of rap and hip-hop. This article argues that the music of these two rappers is transcendental in its depiction and critique of life in c…
Compelled to Perform in the 'Oppressor's' Language? Ndebele Performing Artists and Zimbabwe's Shona-Centric Habitus
This article discusses how the deep-rooted Shona hegemony across all fields of cultural practice in Zimbabwe has compelled some Ndebele arts performers to use Shona language in order to appeal culturally to a Shona audience. Ndebele performing artists have been marginalised if they have not produced artistic works that align themselves with Shona-oriented world views. Primarily using a Bourdieu-inspired theoretical framework, we expose Zimbabwe’s…
Of dirt, disinfection and purgation: Discursive construction of state violence in selected contemporary Zimbabwean literature
This paper examines post-independent Zimbabwean literary narratives which engage with how the ruling ZANU-PF government frames dissenting voices as constituting dirt, filth and undesirability. Making use of Achille Mbembe's postulations on the "vulgarity of power" and Kenneth W. Harrow's readings of the politics of dirt, the central thesis of this paper is that the troping of dirt and state sponsored violence are closely related to the themes of …
Women and North African Literatures
Human Beings Have a Hard Time Relating to That Which Does Not Resemble Them”: Queering Normativity in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon
In this article, I analyse the ways in which Nnedi Okorafor's Afrofuturist novel Lagoon (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2014) challenges stable and so-called normative identities and ways of being. Lagoon narrates the story of aliens landing in Lagos, Nigeria. Through its presentation of shapeshifting aliens, as well as the use of a plurivocal narrative technique enmeshed with Nigerian folktales and myths, the novel destabilises the notions of stabl…
Eternal mothers, whores or witches: The oddities of being a woman in politics in Zimbabwe
In the country where I come from, Zimbabwe, participation in politics and decision-making is very much a masculine affair. Women occupy peripheral positions in which they are expected not to decentre male dominance. Through cultural practices inflated with religious beliefs, women have often been relegated to the domestic space of the home in which their agency is reduced to executing banal household chores. Positionally, as a male academic, I am…
Self-Imposed Exile, Marginality, and Homosexuality in the Novels of Abdellah Taïa, Rachid O., and Eyet-Chékib Djaziri
A burgeoning canon of Maghrebian writers in self-imposed exiled in France has in the last decade begun to openly broach the subject of homosexuality in Arab-Muslim communities of the Maghreb. Novels of writers like Abdellah Taïa, Rachid O. and Eyet-Chékib Djaziri reflect a fascinating trans-Mediterranean construction of homosexual identity. Drawing on Svetlana Boym's critical work, particularly her observation that nostalgia "charts an affective …
Cultures of Change in Contemporary Zimbabwe: Socio-Political Transition from Mugabe to Mnangagwa
Film as /and Popular Social Text: The Reception of John Trengove’s Inxeba/The Wound and Wanuri Kahui’s Rafiki
This article is interested in popular and institutional or state responses to the representations of queerness offered in the films Inxeba/The Wound (South Africa, 2017) and Rafiki (Kenya, 2018). Aside from portraying the marked homophobia that continues to circulate on the African continent, the institutional and state responses to the films have overshadowed the positive popular reception which has characterised conversations around the films o…
Women and North African Literatures
The Zimbabwean Crisis after Mugabe: Multidisciplinary Perspectives
Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy across the Black Diaspora (Keguro Macharia)
Tydskrif vir Letterkunde is an online, peer-reviewed, accredited scholarly journal which publishes original, previously unpublished research and overview articles on theoretical, applied or comparative aspects of African literatures and cultural practices
Skin and Silence in Selected Maghrebian Queer Films
The main premise of this article is that Maghreb cinema cannot openly represent queerness. Nadia El Fani's Bedwin Hacker (2003), Raja Amari's Al Dowaha (Buried Secrets) (2009) and Abdellah Taïa's L’Armée du Salut (The Salvation Army) (2013) represent queerness as muted, silent and secret, performed in darkness and shadowy spaces. Drawing on cultural theories of the significance of skin, I argue that in the selected films, skin and silence are exp…
Queer African Cinemas (Lindsey B. Green-Simms)
Tydskrif vir Letterkunde is an online, peer-reviewed, accredited scholarly journal which publishes original, previously unpublished research and overview articles on theoretical, applied or comparative aspects of African literatures and cultural practices
Abdellah Taïa and an Emergent Queer African Islamic Discourse: Texts, Visibility and Intimate Archives
This article discusses the work of Abdellah Taïa, the first openly gay Moroccan novelist to write his queerness, as a major contribution to an emergent queer African Islamic discourse. Bringing Taïa’s work into conversation with diverse literary texts from elsewhere on the continent, the article makes two major interventions in the field of queer African studies. First, it centres Islam as a resource for queer agency, creativity and subjectivity …
This is Improper and Irreligious: Navigation of Queer Sexuality, Religion, and Practice in Marwan Hamed’s Film Imarat Yácubyan and Abdellah Taïa’s Novel Une Mélancolie Arabe
This article examines the negotiation of queer sexuality in Arab-Muslim societies of North Africa. Through close analysis and reading of the film Imarat Yácubyan by Marwan Hamed (Egypt) and the novel Une Mélancolie Arabe by Abdellah Taïa (Morocco), this article examines how media makes it possible to understand how Muslims in North Africa negotiate their sexuality, religion, and practice against backgrounds in which queerness exists in silence an…
Sociology (31 works) · Gender Studies (27 works) · Art (25 works) · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues (21 works) · History (19 works) · Political science (18 works) · African studies and sociopolitical issues (17 works) · African history and culture studies (16 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · Aesthetics (14 works)