Cuthbeth Tagwirei
Biographic Data
| ID | 4052325 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Cuthbeth Tagwirei |
| GIVEN NAMES | Cuthbeth |
| FAMILY NAME | Tagwirei |
| SIGNATURE | TAGWIREI C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Johannesburg |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2814-2794 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 15 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
WhatsApp coup jokes and the dialogue on Zimbabwean politics
This article analyses the dialogue stemming from viral WhatsApp jokes on the Zimbabwean coup in November 2017. It argues that coup jokes have created an opportunity to discuss the nature of Zimbabwean politics since 2000. This dialogue, characterised by ambivalence, multiplicity, and open-endedness, provides insights on the political traits that have dominated Zimbabwe since 2000. These are rendered as politics of personality, chimurenga and part…
Death and Ubuntu in Oliver Mtukudzi's Music
The musical lyrics of the late Oliver “Tuku” Mtukudzi (1952–2019), by focusing on social-cultural values and practices, are an unexplored but valuable resource for the purpose of thinking about ubuntu and death. In this article, the authors put forward a nuanced examination of the corpus of Tuku's music on death that reveals multiple, inconsistent, contradictory and interrelated insights into how ubuntu and death speak to each other. Getting to d…
Remembering as Imaging: The Memories of Nyamubaya and Hove
This article advances an understanding of memory as image by testing the memories of late Zimbabwean authors Chenjerai Hove and Freedom Nyamubaya against notions of provenance and content which are key to the analysis of images. Narratives about the late writers demonstrate that memories are activities of the consciousness which are directed towards objects external to the mind. In this regard, they are best considered constructs, the result of i…
The nucleation of ubuntu discourse
This article challenges the tendency, in some accounts of ubuntu, to develop a monolithic narrative anchored on a fixed point of reference which I call nucleus. I refer to the discourse arising from these explanations as ‘nucleated ubuntu’ and to the processes which enable such a discourse as nucleation. My focus is on three related ways in which ubuntu discourse is burdened with a nucleus. The first is the grafting of the aphorism umuntu ngumunt…
Heteroglossia and the Destabilisation of Authorial Voice in Bruce Moore-King’s White Man Black War
Through a reading of Moore-King's White Man Black War, this article seeks to demonstrate that white Zimbabwean narratives belong to a heteroglot world, a world of multiple languages, which destabilises the assumed monologism of the white Zimbabwean literary canon. White Man Black War privileges an authorial ideology at the expense of other voices in its pursuit of a single "Truth", something which reflects Zimbabwe's critical tradition that sees …
The “Horror” of African Spirituality
The Conradian journey into the African interior also signified, in the Western colonial imaginary, an encounter with a seemingly incomprehensible spirituality. African spirituality was the site of excess, epitomized by darkness, frenzy, madness, superstition, and illogicality. Based on a reading of Andrea Eames's The Cry of the Go-Away Bird and Peter Godwin's Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa , this article proposes that white-authored Zimbabwean nar…
The Nucleation of White Zimbabwean Writing
Considering literature as a system in dialogue with non-literary systems, this article discusses the ways in which white writing in Zimbabwe finds itself marginalised from mainstream Zimbabwean literature owing to monological approaches which see the literary system as uniform, static and closed. Feeding from, and into, political, media and literary discourses on belonging, these approaches accomplish the nucleation of the system by imposing vari…
Memory, Heritage and the Politics of Transformation: The Place of “Colonial” Texts in Post-2000 South Africa and Zimbabwe
Dealing with a Troubled Rhodesian Past: Narrative Detachment and Intimacy in Peter Godwin's Mukiwa (1996)
This article argues that one of the challenges white Zimbabwean writers have to deal with in their narratives is a troubled colonial past. Godwin's rendition of the past is therefore informed by this recognition, compelling the author to employ narrative strategies which make it possible for him to embrace certain aspects of the past while simultaneously distancing himself from others. This analysis of Godwin's Mukiwa shows how a re-imagined chil…
The Simultaneity of Past and Present in Ian Douglas Smith's The Great Betrayal: The Memoirs of Ian Douglas Smith (1997)
This article proposes a reading of white Zimbabwean narratives that takes cognisance of how the Rhodesian past and the Zimbabwean present inhabit shared time and place. This reading suggests that white Zimbabwean narratives are characterised by simultaneity. In these texts it can be seen that the (Rhodesian) past and the (Zimbabwean) present appear incommensurate but nevertheless coeval. Using Ian Smith's The Great Betrayal: The Memoirs of Ian Do…
From “bush” to “farm”: Emplacement and displacement in contemporary white Zimbabwean narratives
In this article we discuss how places of belonging are imagined in relatively recent white Zimbabwean narratives dealing with issues of land, landscape, and belonging. Two white Zimbabwean narratives, Peter Rimmer’s Cry of the Fish Eagle (1993) and Douglas Rogers’ The Last Resort (2009), are read for the ways in which the paradoxically imagined spaces of the “bush” and the “farm” can be seen to enable, in alternate forms, exigent accommodations w…
Whitelier than white? Inversions of the racial gaze in white Zimbabwean writing
This article looks at inscriptions of whiteness in selected white Zimbabwean narratives. Through a reading of Andrea Eames' The Cry of the Go-Away Bird (2011), Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (2003) and John Eppel's Absent: the English Teacher (2009), the argument proposes that white Zimbabwean narratives situate whiteness within the context of change and marginality in Zimbabwe. The narratives deal with experiences of chang…
Heteroglossia in G.H. Musengezi's The Honourable MP (1984)
This article illustrates how heteroglossia functions in G.H. Musengezi's (1984) satirical play, The Honourable MP. Heteroglossia describes the coexistence, as well as the clashing, of distinct voices within a text. It can be shown that while the playwright has a distinct (and seemingly dominant) voice operating in the play – expressed mainly via the sets of characters he creates and the roles he creates for them, as well as through the play's gen…
Lame ducks’ in the time of HIV/Aids? Exploring female victimhood in selected HIV/Aids narratives by Zimbabwean female writers
This article argues that HIV/AIDS narratives written by Zimbabwean women represent a partial view which positions women at the receiving end of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Women are portrayed as ‘innocent’ and naïve recipients of a disease which finds its sustenance in the way Zimbabwean institutions such as culture, family and the law condone male sexual victimisation of women. Such a view echoes Maureen Kambarami's (2006) ‘women-as-lame-ducks’ thesi…
“Significant Silences” and the Politics of National Reconciliation in Chater’s Crossing the Boundary Fence
The article explores Patricia Chater's Crossing the Boundary Fence (1988) within the framework of Macherey's (1978) concept of "significant silences". I argue that in her representation of the decolonisation of Zimbabwe, the writer circumvents pertinent areas that are central to any discussion of the colonial history of Zimbabwe and the liberation war against colonialism. Among the areas the text is silent on is the role of white people in instit…
Whitelier than white? Inversions of the racial gaze in white Zimbabwean writing
This article looks at inscriptions of whiteness in selected white Zimbabwean narratives. Through a reading of Andrea Eames' The Cry of the Go-Away Bird (2011), Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (2003) and John Eppel's Absent: the English Teacher (2009), the argument proposes that white Zimbabwean narratives situate whiteness within the context of change and marginality in Zimbabwe. The narratives deal with experiences of chang…
WhatsApp coup jokes and the dialogue on Zimbabwean politics
This article analyses the dialogue stemming from viral WhatsApp jokes on the Zimbabwean coup in November 2017. It argues that coup jokes have created an opportunity to discuss the nature of Zimbabwean politics since 2000. This dialogue, characterised by ambivalence, multiplicity, and open-endedness, provides insights on the political traits that have dominated Zimbabwe since 2000. These are rendered as politics of personality, chimurenga and part…
From “bush” to “farm”: Emplacement and displacement in contemporary white Zimbabwean narratives
In this article we discuss how places of belonging are imagined in relatively recent white Zimbabwean narratives dealing with issues of land, landscape, and belonging. Two white Zimbabwean narratives, Peter Rimmer’s Cry of the Fish Eagle (1993) and Douglas Rogers’ The Last Resort (2009), are read for the ways in which the paradoxically imagined spaces of the “bush” and the “farm” can be seen to enable, in alternate forms, exigent accommodations w…
The “Horror” of African Spirituality
The Conradian journey into the African interior also signified, in the Western colonial imaginary, an encounter with a seemingly incomprehensible spirituality. African spirituality was the site of excess, epitomized by darkness, frenzy, madness, superstition, and illogicality. Based on a reading of Andrea Eames's The Cry of the Go-Away Bird and Peter Godwin's Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa , this article proposes that white-authored Zimbabwean nar…
The nucleation of ubuntu discourse
This article challenges the tendency, in some accounts of ubuntu, to develop a monolithic narrative anchored on a fixed point of reference which I call nucleus. I refer to the discourse arising from these explanations as ‘nucleated ubuntu’ and to the processes which enable such a discourse as nucleation. My focus is on three related ways in which ubuntu discourse is burdened with a nucleus. The first is the grafting of the aphorism umuntu ngumunt…
The Simultaneity of Past and Present in Ian Douglas Smith's The Great Betrayal: The Memoirs of Ian Douglas Smith (1997)
This article proposes a reading of white Zimbabwean narratives that takes cognisance of how the Rhodesian past and the Zimbabwean present inhabit shared time and place. This reading suggests that white Zimbabwean narratives are characterised by simultaneity. In these texts it can be seen that the (Rhodesian) past and the (Zimbabwean) present appear incommensurate but nevertheless coeval. Using Ian Smith's The Great Betrayal: The Memoirs of Ian Do…
Lame ducks’ in the time of HIV/Aids? Exploring female victimhood in selected HIV/Aids narratives by Zimbabwean female writers
This article argues that HIV/AIDS narratives written by Zimbabwean women represent a partial view which positions women at the receiving end of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Women are portrayed as ‘innocent’ and naïve recipients of a disease which finds its sustenance in the way Zimbabwean institutions such as culture, family and the law condone male sexual victimisation of women. Such a view echoes Maureen Kambarami's (2006) ‘women-as-lame-ducks’ thesi…
“Significant Silences” and the Politics of National Reconciliation in Chater’s Crossing the Boundary Fence
The article explores Patricia Chater's Crossing the Boundary Fence (1988) within the framework of Macherey's (1978) concept of "significant silences". I argue that in her representation of the decolonisation of Zimbabwe, the writer circumvents pertinent areas that are central to any discussion of the colonial history of Zimbabwe and the liberation war against colonialism. Among the areas the text is silent on is the role of white people in instit…
Heteroglossia in G.H. Musengezi's The Honourable MP (1984)
This article illustrates how heteroglossia functions in G.H. Musengezi's (1984) satirical play, The Honourable MP. Heteroglossia describes the coexistence, as well as the clashing, of distinct voices within a text. It can be shown that while the playwright has a distinct (and seemingly dominant) voice operating in the play – expressed mainly via the sets of characters he creates and the roles he creates for them, as well as through the play's gen…
Lame ducks’ in the time of HIV/Aids? Exploring female victimhood in selected HIV/Aids narratives by Zimbabwean female writers
This article argues that HIV/AIDS narratives written by Zimbabwean women represent a partial view which positions women at the receiving end of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Women are portrayed as ‘innocent’ and naïve recipients of a disease which finds its sustenance in the way Zimbabwean institutions such as culture, family and the law condone male sexual victimisation of women. Such a view echoes Maureen Kambarami's (2006) ‘women-as-lame-ducks’ thesi…
Dealing with a Troubled Rhodesian Past: Narrative Detachment and Intimacy in Peter Godwin's Mukiwa (1996)
This article argues that one of the challenges white Zimbabwean writers have to deal with in their narratives is a troubled colonial past. Godwin's rendition of the past is therefore informed by this recognition, compelling the author to employ narrative strategies which make it possible for him to embrace certain aspects of the past while simultaneously distancing himself from others. This analysis of Godwin's Mukiwa shows how a re-imagined chil…
The Simultaneity of Past and Present in Ian Douglas Smith's The Great Betrayal: The Memoirs of Ian Douglas Smith (1997)
This article proposes a reading of white Zimbabwean narratives that takes cognisance of how the Rhodesian past and the Zimbabwean present inhabit shared time and place. This reading suggests that white Zimbabwean narratives are characterised by simultaneity. In these texts it can be seen that the (Rhodesian) past and the (Zimbabwean) present appear incommensurate but nevertheless coeval. Using Ian Smith's The Great Betrayal: The Memoirs of Ian Do…
From “bush” to “farm”: Emplacement and displacement in contemporary white Zimbabwean narratives
In this article we discuss how places of belonging are imagined in relatively recent white Zimbabwean narratives dealing with issues of land, landscape, and belonging. Two white Zimbabwean narratives, Peter Rimmer’s Cry of the Fish Eagle (1993) and Douglas Rogers’ The Last Resort (2009), are read for the ways in which the paradoxically imagined spaces of the “bush” and the “farm” can be seen to enable, in alternate forms, exigent accommodations w…
Whitelier than white? Inversions of the racial gaze in white Zimbabwean writing
This article looks at inscriptions of whiteness in selected white Zimbabwean narratives. Through a reading of Andrea Eames' The Cry of the Go-Away Bird (2011), Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight (2003) and John Eppel's Absent: the English Teacher (2009), the argument proposes that white Zimbabwean narratives situate whiteness within the context of change and marginality in Zimbabwe. The narratives deal with experiences of chang…
The Nucleation of White Zimbabwean Writing
Considering literature as a system in dialogue with non-literary systems, this article discusses the ways in which white writing in Zimbabwe finds itself marginalised from mainstream Zimbabwean literature owing to monological approaches which see the literary system as uniform, static and closed. Feeding from, and into, political, media and literary discourses on belonging, these approaches accomplish the nucleation of the system by imposing vari…
Memory, Heritage and the Politics of Transformation: The Place of “Colonial” Texts in Post-2000 South Africa and Zimbabwe
The “Horror” of African Spirituality
The Conradian journey into the African interior also signified, in the Western colonial imaginary, an encounter with a seemingly incomprehensible spirituality. African spirituality was the site of excess, epitomized by darkness, frenzy, madness, superstition, and illogicality. Based on a reading of Andrea Eames's The Cry of the Go-Away Bird and Peter Godwin's Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa , this article proposes that white-authored Zimbabwean nar…
Heteroglossia and the Destabilisation of Authorial Voice in Bruce Moore-King’s White Man Black War
Through a reading of Moore-King's White Man Black War, this article seeks to demonstrate that white Zimbabwean narratives belong to a heteroglot world, a world of multiple languages, which destabilises the assumed monologism of the white Zimbabwean literary canon. White Man Black War privileges an authorial ideology at the expense of other voices in its pursuit of a single "Truth", something which reflects Zimbabwe's critical tradition that sees …
Death and Ubuntu in Oliver Mtukudzi's Music
The musical lyrics of the late Oliver “Tuku” Mtukudzi (1952–2019), by focusing on social-cultural values and practices, are an unexplored but valuable resource for the purpose of thinking about ubuntu and death. In this article, the authors put forward a nuanced examination of the corpus of Tuku's music on death that reveals multiple, inconsistent, contradictory and interrelated insights into how ubuntu and death speak to each other. Getting to d…
Remembering as Imaging: The Memories of Nyamubaya and Hove
This article advances an understanding of memory as image by testing the memories of late Zimbabwean authors Chenjerai Hove and Freedom Nyamubaya against notions of provenance and content which are key to the analysis of images. Narratives about the late writers demonstrate that memories are activities of the consciousness which are directed towards objects external to the mind. In this regard, they are best considered constructs, the result of i…
The nucleation of ubuntu discourse
This article challenges the tendency, in some accounts of ubuntu, to develop a monolithic narrative anchored on a fixed point of reference which I call nucleus. I refer to the discourse arising from these explanations as ‘nucleated ubuntu’ and to the processes which enable such a discourse as nucleation. My focus is on three related ways in which ubuntu discourse is burdened with a nucleus. The first is the grafting of the aphorism umuntu ngumunt…
WhatsApp coup jokes and the dialogue on Zimbabwean politics
This article analyses the dialogue stemming from viral WhatsApp jokes on the Zimbabwean coup in November 2017. It argues that coup jokes have created an opportunity to discuss the nature of Zimbabwean politics since 2000. This dialogue, characterised by ambivalence, multiplicity, and open-endedness, provides insights on the political traits that have dominated Zimbabwe since 2000. These are rendered as politics of personality, chimurenga and part…
Sociology (15 works) · African studies and sociopolitical issues (12 works) · Art (11 works) · Narrative (11 works) · Literature (10 works) · Law (9 works) · African history and culture studies (8 works) · Gender Studies (8 works) · History (8 works) · Political science (8 works)