Mealies, mothers, and meats
Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 15439419 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Manisha Basu (0000-0001-7080-4272, University of Illinois System, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-18 |
| Publication date | 2026-04-11 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Food Culture & Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1552-8014 • E-ISSN: 1751-7443 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/15528014.2026.2652069 |
| OpenAlex | W7153502797 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 16 |
This essay argues that the Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 debut novel, Nervous Conditions stages the twinned tropes of food and motherhood as important material and psychoaffective sites on which colonized subjects navigate questions of desire, identity, and resistance. Employing food regimes theory, “Mealies, Mothers, and Meats” shows that different maternal figures appear in the novel as stewardesses of foodways which are the corporeal basis for distinct native and colonial lifeways. The black, female protagonist’s coming-of-age is mediated by two opposed mother figures – her impoverished, unlettered birth mother who represents the abject, colonized motherland and her wealthy, British-educated aunt by marriage who represents the imperial mother country. The latter penetrates the former’s agroecological food sovereignty with the full force of an imperially inflected food system replete with items drawn from colonial resource-extraction and fossil-fuel driven industrial processes. The young protagonist is drawn away from native foodways and into imperially inflected cultures of eating when, for the sake of a colonial education, she moves from her rural homestead to her aunt’s home on a mission. Dangarembga thus demonstrates that deep in the folds of everyday food experiences helmed by mother figures are the shifting configurations of geopolitical power.
Identification (biology · Process (computing · Product (mathematics · African history and culture studies · Archaeology and Rock Art Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories
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A dollop of sadza and a bag of mealie meal
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Zimbabwean Foodways, Feminisms, and Transforming Nationalisms in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names
Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism
A food regime genealogy
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| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |