Robert Muponde
Biographic Data
| ID | 3674693 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert Muponde |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert |
| FAMILY NAME | Muponde |
| SIGNATURE | MUPONDE R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Witwatersrand |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
African Literature in Transition
This book offers a compelling new approach to African literatures as formed by and itself a form of collective memory. It explores the historical spaces and maps that African literature brings to the surface and re-imagines in novel ways. The stories that matter about what happened in the past together constitute a collective memory that African writers and readers draw upon to locate themselves within the world. The book examines the mental maps…
Valleys of Strife
The geologic as an archive foments the naturalization of human conflict in African literature. African literature makes certain relations a natural property of the geological character of the land. It makes it impossible to think of social and political alterations without reflecting violent eruptions. Geological structures not only are presented as arenas for human activities but naturalize human perception and anti-colonial conflict mirrored th…
The social lives of mobile telephony in Africa
This Special Issue aims to research the multi-disciplinary ways in which a conception of the mobile phone as having more lives (than the dominant deterministic and economistic approach to mobile ph
Pliz cal me
Through the genre of fictional essay, ideas to do with the personal experiencing of mobile telephony in specific situations and contexts in Africa are explored. The essay uses the trope of the much used ‘please call me’ facility as a way into a discussion of the weaponisation of calls and text messages, and the creativity around countering and subverting what should be considered the violence of mobile telephony. Beyond personal traumas associate…
I am well if you are well
Tsitsi Dangarembga's novels provide us with ways of thinking about philanthropic practices in Africa and in the world by using the lens of the gift-as-charity in a self-help project. It becomes clear that the power structures which are animated in the act of charitable giving do create bonds of violence, instead of solidarity, where inequalities are exacerbated, instead of being lessened. Charity sometimes deepens these inequalities that bedevil …
Dictatorships, disasters, and African soccer
This article is a reflection on a particular moment in Zimbabwean soccer, the National Sports Stadium disaster of July 2000. Reading the soccer stadium as a dense semiotic site with many slippages of symbols and meanings, the article draws links between the game of football and that of politics. Both games offer narratives of the nation that constantly collide and merge as they share the same features. Complex rules regulate both games but there …
The ball is round
Cultural migrancies
If ‘struggle’ is the foundation of the new postcolonial literature and state, ‘the matter of Zimbabwe’ secures unquestioned tenancy to literatures of the folkways of yore. In this article, this false binary is disputed in favour of fusions and continuities. The article discusses the ‘matter of Zimbabwe’ via two Shona song-dramas, whose construction and visions border on the timeless and mythopoetic. The two song-dramas, Chomtengure and Uyo Ndiani…
Folklorising the Newsman
Geoffrey Nyarota, the author of Against the Grain: Memoirs of a Zimbabwean Newsman (2006) is well known in Zimbabwe's media and political circles as a troubling and troubled, and now self-exiled journalist. His name is controversially folklorised as synonymous with the growth, tensions, and fate of the Zimbabwean story as told by newsmen. He is not known as a writer of books. His memoirs, advertised as long-awaited, and their arrival coinciding w…
Singing history makes it lyrical
There is a unifying aesthetic at work in the poem-songs of Chirikure Chirikure, the Zimbabwean writer and musician. This aesthetic is distilled from from the mingling, hybridization of other kinds of music, poetry and folk forms emerging in Zimbabwe. Chirikure helps us to understand the poem-song as a multi-sited genre. It is a uniquely poetic and dramatic genre which is capable of adopting other artistic forms without losing its own founding coh…
Ngugi's Gandhi
Ngugi's novel Weep Not, Child has gained canonical status. One trope that has remained largely unexamined is that of Gandhi and the depiction of Indians in the novel. Gandhi appears briefly in the opening pages of the novel and the remainder of the narrative is punctuated with passing depictions of and comments on Indian traders. This article argues that Ngugi does not consciously harness the figure of Gandhi as a symbolic resource in the African…
Manning the Nation
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 …
Reading Girlhood under the Tongue
The agony and disorientation suffered by a girl child during and after the brutal rape by her father is the basis of Yvonne Vera's cumulative tale of unrelieved pain and unspeakable silences. The narrative of absolute loss sublimates into a sublime aesthetic experience through the finely honed metaphors of both subjection and recuperation, stasis and motion, trauma and resilience. The novel Under the Tongue (1996) is itself an instance of the unv…
Opinion, Dialogue, Review
The Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera mobilizes recollections of childhood not only as an event in his adult life, but as a way of articulating a longing for new forms of social consciousness. Childhood itself is recalled both as narrative and source of narrative. As such it is a place and time of memory. It is not just a construct of writing, but a way of coming to terms with an enormous social experience. This article discusses the nature of…
Roots/Routes
Childhood, space and belonging
Killing the Father
The contradictory impulses that characterise writing on Dambudzo Marechera's life and times were foreshadowed a long time ago in 1971 in an obligatory testimonial by his high school principal, Father Daniel Pearce, an Anglican priest. I discuss briefly the ways in which he maps Marechera's life, and suggest that he prefigured so much of its seeming intricacy and mythical qualities. Subsequent critics of his writing have only elaborated the contra…
Dictatorships, disasters, and African soccer
This article is a reflection on a particular moment in Zimbabwean soccer, the National Sports Stadium disaster of July 2000. Reading the soccer stadium as a dense semiotic site with many slippages of symbols and meanings, the article draws links between the game of football and that of politics. Both games offer narratives of the nation that constantly collide and merge as they share the same features. Complex rules regulate both games but there …
I am well if you are well
Tsitsi Dangarembga's novels provide us with ways of thinking about philanthropic practices in Africa and in the world by using the lens of the gift-as-charity in a self-help project. It becomes clear that the power structures which are animated in the act of charitable giving do create bonds of violence, instead of solidarity, where inequalities are exacerbated, instead of being lessened. Charity sometimes deepens these inequalities that bedevil …
The social lives of mobile telephony in Africa
This Special Issue aims to research the multi-disciplinary ways in which a conception of the mobile phone as having more lives (than the dominant deterministic and economistic approach to mobile ph
Pliz cal me
Through the genre of fictional essay, ideas to do with the personal experiencing of mobile telephony in specific situations and contexts in Africa are explored. The essay uses the trope of the much used ‘please call me’ facility as a way into a discussion of the weaponisation of calls and text messages, and the creativity around countering and subverting what should be considered the violence of mobile telephony. Beyond personal traumas associate…
Ngugi's Gandhi
Ngugi's novel Weep Not, Child has gained canonical status. One trope that has remained largely unexamined is that of Gandhi and the depiction of Indians in the novel. Gandhi appears briefly in the opening pages of the novel and the remainder of the narrative is punctuated with passing depictions of and comments on Indian traders. This article argues that Ngugi does not consciously harness the figure of Gandhi as a symbolic resource in the African…
Reading Girlhood under the Tongue
The agony and disorientation suffered by a girl child during and after the brutal rape by her father is the basis of Yvonne Vera's cumulative tale of unrelieved pain and unspeakable silences. The narrative of absolute loss sublimates into a sublime aesthetic experience through the finely honed metaphors of both subjection and recuperation, stasis and motion, trauma and resilience. The novel Under the Tongue (1996) is itself an instance of the unv…
Roots/Routes
Childhood, space and belonging
Killing the Father
The contradictory impulses that characterise writing on Dambudzo Marechera's life and times were foreshadowed a long time ago in 1971 in an obligatory testimonial by his high school principal, Father Daniel Pearce, an Anglican priest. I discuss briefly the ways in which he maps Marechera's life, and suggest that he prefigured so much of its seeming intricacy and mythical qualities. Subsequent critics of his writing have only elaborated the contra…
Roots/Routes
Opinion, Dialogue, Review
The Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera mobilizes recollections of childhood not only as an event in his adult life, but as a way of articulating a longing for new forms of social consciousness. Childhood itself is recalled both as narrative and source of narrative. As such it is a place and time of memory. It is not just a construct of writing, but a way of coming to terms with an enormous social experience. This article discusses the nature of…
Manning the Nation
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 …
Reading Girlhood under the Tongue
The agony and disorientation suffered by a girl child during and after the brutal rape by her father is the basis of Yvonne Vera's cumulative tale of unrelieved pain and unspeakable silences. The narrative of absolute loss sublimates into a sublime aesthetic experience through the finely honed metaphors of both subjection and recuperation, stasis and motion, trauma and resilience. The novel Under the Tongue (1996) is itself an instance of the unv…
Singing history makes it lyrical
There is a unifying aesthetic at work in the poem-songs of Chirikure Chirikure, the Zimbabwean writer and musician. This aesthetic is distilled from from the mingling, hybridization of other kinds of music, poetry and folk forms emerging in Zimbabwe. Chirikure helps us to understand the poem-song as a multi-sited genre. It is a uniquely poetic and dramatic genre which is capable of adopting other artistic forms without losing its own founding coh…
Ngugi's Gandhi
Ngugi's novel Weep Not, Child has gained canonical status. One trope that has remained largely unexamined is that of Gandhi and the depiction of Indians in the novel. Gandhi appears briefly in the opening pages of the novel and the remainder of the narrative is punctuated with passing depictions of and comments on Indian traders. This article argues that Ngugi does not consciously harness the figure of Gandhi as a symbolic resource in the African…
Folklorising the Newsman
Geoffrey Nyarota, the author of Against the Grain: Memoirs of a Zimbabwean Newsman (2006) is well known in Zimbabwe's media and political circles as a troubling and troubled, and now self-exiled journalist. His name is controversially folklorised as synonymous with the growth, tensions, and fate of the Zimbabwean story as told by newsmen. He is not known as a writer of books. His memoirs, advertised as long-awaited, and their arrival coinciding w…
Cultural migrancies
If ‘struggle’ is the foundation of the new postcolonial literature and state, ‘the matter of Zimbabwe’ secures unquestioned tenancy to literatures of the folkways of yore. In this article, this false binary is disputed in favour of fusions and continuities. The article discusses the ‘matter of Zimbabwe’ via two Shona song-dramas, whose construction and visions border on the timeless and mythopoetic. The two song-dramas, Chomtengure and Uyo Ndiani…
I am well if you are well
Tsitsi Dangarembga's novels provide us with ways of thinking about philanthropic practices in Africa and in the world by using the lens of the gift-as-charity in a self-help project. It becomes clear that the power structures which are animated in the act of charitable giving do create bonds of violence, instead of solidarity, where inequalities are exacerbated, instead of being lessened. Charity sometimes deepens these inequalities that bedevil …
Dictatorships, disasters, and African soccer
This article is a reflection on a particular moment in Zimbabwean soccer, the National Sports Stadium disaster of July 2000. Reading the soccer stadium as a dense semiotic site with many slippages of symbols and meanings, the article draws links between the game of football and that of politics. Both games offer narratives of the nation that constantly collide and merge as they share the same features. Complex rules regulate both games but there …
The ball is round
The social lives of mobile telephony in Africa
This Special Issue aims to research the multi-disciplinary ways in which a conception of the mobile phone as having more lives (than the dominant deterministic and economistic approach to mobile ph
Pliz cal me
Through the genre of fictional essay, ideas to do with the personal experiencing of mobile telephony in specific situations and contexts in Africa are explored. The essay uses the trope of the much used ‘please call me’ facility as a way into a discussion of the weaponisation of calls and text messages, and the creativity around countering and subverting what should be considered the violence of mobile telephony. Beyond personal traumas associate…
African Literature in Transition
This book offers a compelling new approach to African literatures as formed by and itself a form of collective memory. It explores the historical spaces and maps that African literature brings to the surface and re-imagines in novel ways. The stories that matter about what happened in the past together constitute a collective memory that African writers and readers draw upon to locate themselves within the world. The book examines the mental maps…
Valleys of Strife
The geologic as an archive foments the naturalization of human conflict in African literature. African literature makes certain relations a natural property of the geological character of the land. It makes it impossible to think of social and political alterations without reflecting violent eruptions. Geological structures not only are presented as arenas for human activities but naturalize human perception and anti-colonial conflict mirrored th…
Sociology (12 works) · Art (11 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Literature (9 works) · African studies and sociopolitical issues (7 works) · History (7 works) · Narrative (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Political science (6 works)