Esther Mavengano
Biographic Data
| ID | 4052296 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Esther Mavengano |
| GIVEN NAMES | Esther |
| FAMILY NAME | Mavengano |
| SIGNATURE | MAVENGANO E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Great Zimbabwe University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2499-4508 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 13 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Commodified liberation
Post-apartheid freedom in Jackie Phamotse’s Bare: The Blesser’s Game is depicted as a terrain characterised by colonial hierarchical legacies, rearticulated through seductive, market-driven forms. This study interrogates the reconfiguration of elite post-apartheid masculinities, with particular attention to the contradictions and exclusions that structure post-liberation identity. It contends that the ‘blesser’ projects a historically specific fo…
‘And now we are sisters’
In Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street, African women confront the harsh realities of transnational sex work, forming fleeting connections in a world that continues to deny their presence. This study examines the novel’s nuanced inscriptions of trauma, fractured intimacies and the precarious solidarity that forms even amid systems of exploitation. I draw primarily on Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory while engaging Judith Butler’s notions of preca…
(Un)Masking Grief
In this study I critically study selected short stories from Julius Chingono’s collection Not Another Day , a volume that skillfully captures the textures of everyday life in Zimbabwe through a fusion of irreverent humour and moving insight. My analysis attends to Chingono’s fascinating use of satire, linguistic play, and tonal modulation in order to interrogate the interplay of political decay, social absurdities, and the affective toll of syste…
Shifting Sociolinguistic Terrains in Postcolonial Anglophone African Literary Writings
Cartographies of difference
The treatment of space in Mphuthumi Ntabeni’s novel The Wanderers provides important prisms through which the interlocking issues of race, gender and human frailties can be investigated. In this study, I bring together Michel Foucault and Doreen Massey’s perceptive formulations of spatiality and power to interrogate how Ntabeni’s representation of space intersects with the troubling tropes of racialised, gendered and dis-eased bodies in post-apar…
Religion, gender-based violence and silence
The intersection of religion, culture and gender-based violence (GBV) continues to provoke critical debates in feminist scholarship and activism. Although substantial steps are noticeable in terms of addressing numerous forms of violence against women, religion and culture in the African context continue to promulgate harmful practices. Chika Unigwe’s novel, The Middle Daughter, highlights a world where religion, GBV, social norms, rape myths, si…
Bare life and subjectivity in post-Independence era
The demise of Apartheid and colonialism in South Africa and Zimbabwe ushered in hope among the masses, who expected transformation to improve their economic, political and social conditions. However, context and history conspired to orchestrate persistent suffering, uncertainty and existential angst, which find expression in literary works. Drawing from Agamben’s concept of biopolitics, we interrogate fictional representations of economic and soc…
Electoral Politics in Zimbabwe, Volume I
Electoral Politics in Zimbabwe, Vol II
The Nehanda mythology
Recently, the government of Zimbabwe unveiled a newly constructed statue of the esteemed spirit medium and liberation icon who intrepidly fought against the British imperialism. The distinguished heroine is passionately known as Mbuya Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana. The lexical item, ‘Mbuya’ in Shona language literally means grandmother. This study examines the ways in which the spectres of religion, historiography, gender and national politics find …
The phallocentric paradox and semantics of Eve’s myth in Zimbabwe’s contemporary national politics
NoViolet Bulawayo’s recently published novel titled, Glory , fictionalises the tragic fall of Robert Mugabe from the helm of power. The removal of Mugabe from power through the 2017 “military coup” engendered a problematic narrative that depicted the former first lady, Grace Mugabe as the biblical Eve’s doppelganger. The purported resemblance of Eve, a character from sacrosanct text, and Grace of contemporary Zimbabwe is often based on mythical a…
Electoral Politics in Zimbabwe, Vol I
Exploring Africanisation of the University Curriculum in Zimbabwe
Conversations about Africanisation of university curriculum are part of the epistemic crisis and efforts to debunk Eurocentric thinking characterised by binarisms, racial biases and discriminatory attitudes towards Africans. An Afrocentric perspective troubles conceptualisation of notions of African humanity vis-à-vis the vexing question of epistemological trajectories undertaken in postcolonial Zimbabwe. This study focuses on African efforts to …
Re-reading xenophobic discourses from an ubuntu perspective
Classification of African migrants in South Africa as undesirable, economic parasites, illegals, among other derogatory terms, characterises current xenophobic discourses and foregrounds frontiers that divide people in Africa. Xenophobia violates the philosophy of ubuntu/Vumunhu/Umunhu and the parable of the Good Samaritan which define humanity as diverse but collective. Drawing from this philosophy and parable as prisms through which xenophobic …
Representations of rhizomatic identitarian trajectories in selected contemporary Southern African narratives
The subject of identity is a very complex one as highlighted by the amount of scholarship on this topic as well as a varied range of perspectives that have been used to approach it. Probably, it is because identity is a life-long process that it continues to take new forms and new directions through deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, the ‘lines of flight’ from Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary. Furthermore, identification takes place …
Religious Charlatanisms and the Vulgarity of power
The end of British rule in Zimbabwe which happened through a protracted liberation struggle against the white regime was celebrated by many across Africa and beyond. The ascendancy of the late president Robert Gabriel Mugabe to the helm of power brought hope for the economic, religious, linguistic, and socio-political freedoms. The attainment of independence was indeed a moment of celebration after several decades of colonial suppression and brut…
Re-reading xenophobic discourses from an ubuntu perspective
Classification of African migrants in South Africa as undesirable, economic parasites, illegals, among other derogatory terms, characterises current xenophobic discourses and foregrounds frontiers that divide people in Africa. Xenophobia violates the philosophy of ubuntu/Vumunhu/Umunhu and the parable of the Good Samaritan which define humanity as diverse but collective. Drawing from this philosophy and parable as prisms through which xenophobic …
Representations of rhizomatic identitarian trajectories in selected contemporary Southern African narratives
The subject of identity is a very complex one as highlighted by the amount of scholarship on this topic as well as a varied range of perspectives that have been used to approach it. Probably, it is because identity is a life-long process that it continues to take new forms and new directions through deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, the ‘lines of flight’ from Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary. Furthermore, identification takes place …
Religious Charlatanisms and the Vulgarity of power
The end of British rule in Zimbabwe which happened through a protracted liberation struggle against the white regime was celebrated by many across Africa and beyond. The ascendancy of the late president Robert Gabriel Mugabe to the helm of power brought hope for the economic, religious, linguistic, and socio-political freedoms. The attainment of independence was indeed a moment of celebration after several decades of colonial suppression and brut…
Exploring Africanisation of the University Curriculum in Zimbabwe
Conversations about Africanisation of university curriculum are part of the epistemic crisis and efforts to debunk Eurocentric thinking characterised by binarisms, racial biases and discriminatory attitudes towards Africans. An Afrocentric perspective troubles conceptualisation of notions of African humanity vis-à-vis the vexing question of epistemological trajectories undertaken in postcolonial Zimbabwe. This study focuses on African efforts to …
Re-reading xenophobic discourses from an ubuntu perspective
Classification of African migrants in South Africa as undesirable, economic parasites, illegals, among other derogatory terms, characterises current xenophobic discourses and foregrounds frontiers that divide people in Africa. Xenophobia violates the philosophy of ubuntu/Vumunhu/Umunhu and the parable of the Good Samaritan which define humanity as diverse but collective. Drawing from this philosophy and parable as prisms through which xenophobic …
Electoral Politics in Zimbabwe, Volume I
Electoral Politics in Zimbabwe, Vol II
The Nehanda mythology
Recently, the government of Zimbabwe unveiled a newly constructed statue of the esteemed spirit medium and liberation icon who intrepidly fought against the British imperialism. The distinguished heroine is passionately known as Mbuya Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana. The lexical item, ‘Mbuya’ in Shona language literally means grandmother. This study examines the ways in which the spectres of religion, historiography, gender and national politics find …
The phallocentric paradox and semantics of Eve’s myth in Zimbabwe’s contemporary national politics
NoViolet Bulawayo’s recently published novel titled, Glory , fictionalises the tragic fall of Robert Mugabe from the helm of power. The removal of Mugabe from power through the 2017 “military coup” engendered a problematic narrative that depicted the former first lady, Grace Mugabe as the biblical Eve’s doppelganger. The purported resemblance of Eve, a character from sacrosanct text, and Grace of contemporary Zimbabwe is often based on mythical a…
Electoral Politics in Zimbabwe, Vol I
Religion, gender-based violence and silence
The intersection of religion, culture and gender-based violence (GBV) continues to provoke critical debates in feminist scholarship and activism. Although substantial steps are noticeable in terms of addressing numerous forms of violence against women, religion and culture in the African context continue to promulgate harmful practices. Chika Unigwe’s novel, The Middle Daughter, highlights a world where religion, GBV, social norms, rape myths, si…
Bare life and subjectivity in post-Independence era
The demise of Apartheid and colonialism in South Africa and Zimbabwe ushered in hope among the masses, who expected transformation to improve their economic, political and social conditions. However, context and history conspired to orchestrate persistent suffering, uncertainty and existential angst, which find expression in literary works. Drawing from Agamben’s concept of biopolitics, we interrogate fictional representations of economic and soc…
Shifting Sociolinguistic Terrains in Postcolonial Anglophone African Literary Writings
Cartographies of difference
The treatment of space in Mphuthumi Ntabeni’s novel The Wanderers provides important prisms through which the interlocking issues of race, gender and human frailties can be investigated. In this study, I bring together Michel Foucault and Doreen Massey’s perceptive formulations of spatiality and power to interrogate how Ntabeni’s representation of space intersects with the troubling tropes of racialised, gendered and dis-eased bodies in post-apar…
Commodified liberation
Post-apartheid freedom in Jackie Phamotse’s Bare: The Blesser’s Game is depicted as a terrain characterised by colonial hierarchical legacies, rearticulated through seductive, market-driven forms. This study interrogates the reconfiguration of elite post-apartheid masculinities, with particular attention to the contradictions and exclusions that structure post-liberation identity. It contends that the ‘blesser’ projects a historically specific fo…
‘And now we are sisters’
In Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street, African women confront the harsh realities of transnational sex work, forming fleeting connections in a world that continues to deny their presence. This study examines the novel’s nuanced inscriptions of trauma, fractured intimacies and the precarious solidarity that forms even amid systems of exploitation. I draw primarily on Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory while engaging Judith Butler’s notions of preca…
(Un)Masking Grief
In this study I critically study selected short stories from Julius Chingono’s collection Not Another Day , a volume that skillfully captures the textures of everyday life in Zimbabwe through a fusion of irreverent humour and moving insight. My analysis attends to Chingono’s fascinating use of satire, linguistic play, and tonal modulation in order to interrogate the interplay of political decay, social absurdities, and the affective toll of syste…
Sociology (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · Law (8 works) · African studies and sociopolitical issues (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Narrative (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (6 works)