Cultural Texts of Resistance in Zimbabwe explores how ordinary citizens appropriate and deploy cultural texts such as internet memes, songs, political cartoons and social media discussions as vehicles to contest hegemonic narratives of the state and insert alternative ways of imagining the future of the nation. This book is a timely attempt to examine the multiple and complex dimensions of resistance in post-millennial Zimbabwe through analysing different cultural productions. It centres the voices of ordinary Zimbabweans by examining popular cultural texts that reflect their experiences and ways of living within the Zimbabwean crisis of the post-2000 period. The book argues that subversive cultural texts have become important tools that ordinary citizens appropriate to challenge the repressive political environment and imagine different ways of writing the nation. The book brings a fresh perspective to ongoing discussions on how popular cultural texts contribute to the narration of the nation, especially in the context of crisis.

The book is the result of a collaboration of scholars from southern Africa and overseas, whose work emphasises hitherto overshadowed subjects of literature, exposing new and untried approaches to Zimbabwean writing. The contributors focus on pluralities, inclusiveness and the breaking of boundaries, and elucidate how literary texts are betraying multiple versions and opinions of Zimbabwe, arguing that only a multiplicity of opinions on Zimbabwe can do the complexity of the society and history justice.

In light of the uses and misuses of history in Zimbabwean politics in recent years, this research report focuses on how versions of the country "s liberation war history have become a site of struggle over the definition of Zimbabwean national identity. As "identity politics" often do, Zimbabwean nationalism draws on a wide field of cultural symbols of identity and political discourses of inclusion and exclusion. Therefore, the report takes a cross-disciplinary approach to the issue of national identity by "mapping out" the imaginary field of Zimbabwean nationalism. This approach opens up the possibility of cross-reading the political discourses of the President and the ruling party ZANU (PF) with opposing voices such as those in the works of the author Yvonne Vera. This cross-reading shows how Vera "s novels and the political discourses participate in the struggle over Zimbabwean national identity by offering different versions of the nation "s history in the form of "patriotic history," "feminist nationalism," or narratives of difference. In this way the research report adds to our understanding of power and resistance in Zimbabwean politics of national identity.

In this new history of music in Zimbabwe, Mhoze Chikowero deftly uses African sources to interrogate the copious colonial archive, reading it as a confessional voice along and against the grain to write a complex history of music, colonialism, and African self-liberation. Chikowero's book begins in the 1890s with missionary crusades against African performative cultures and African students being inducted into mission bands, which contextualize the music of segregated urban and mining company dance halls in the 1930s, and he builds genealogies of the Chimurenga music later popularized by guerrilla artists like Dorothy Masuku, Zexie Manatsa, Thomas Mapfumo, and others in the 1970s. Chikowero shows how Africans deployed their music and indigenous knowledge systems to fight for their freedom from British colonial domination and to assert their cultural sovereignty.

What are the right questions to ask when seeking out the spirit of a nation? In November, 2017, the people of Zimbabwe took to the streets in an unprecedented alliance with the military. Their goal, to restore the legacy of Chimurenga, the liberation struggle, and wrest their country back from more than 30 years of Robert Mugabe's rule. In an essay that combines bold reportage, memoir, and critical analysis, Zimbabwean novelist and journalist Panashe Chigumadzi reflects on the "coup that was not a coup," the telling of history and manipulation of time and the ancestral spirts of two women--her own grandmother and Mbuya Nehanda, the grandmother of the nation.

This book traces through song, theatre, poetry, novel, film, television and rituals of spirit possession, the multiple shifts in values, ideals and beliefs that have taken place in the black people's struggles for survival.