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.

Engaging questions of language, identity, and reception to restore South African and diaspora writing to the African literary tradition

Imagination and the Creative Impulse in the New Literatures in English brings together the proceedings of a symposium organised by the editors at the University of Trento in 1990. At a time when the study of the post-colonial literatures is gaining more widespread recognition, scholars based mainly at universities in Italy and Germany were invited to address the manner in which writers are giving literary expression to the complexity of contemporary post-colonial and multicultural societies and to consider, from their differing perspectives on the new literatures, central questions of formal experimentation, linguistic innovation, social and political commitment, textual theory and cross-culturality. Focusing on such major writers such as Achebe, Soyinka and Walcott, as well as on lesser-known figures such as Jack Davis, Witi Ihimaera, Rohinton Mistry and Manohar Malgonkar, the contributors take up many themes characteristic of the new literatures: the challenge posed to traditional authority, the expression of national identity, the role of literature in the liberation struggle, modes of literary practice in multicultural societies; the relationship of the new literatures in English to that of the former metropolitan centre; and the complex intertextuality characterizing much of the literary production of post-colonial societies.

The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950 examines the institutional and social peculiarities that make fiction produced in Africa and the Atlantic World since 1950 important to the history of the novel in English.

Conditioned by local ways of knowing and doing, Great Zimbabwe develops a new interpretation of the famous World Heritage site of Great Zimbabwe. It combines archaeological knowledge, including recent material from the author’s excavations, with native concepts and philosophies. Working from a large data set has made it possible, for the first time, to develop an archaeology of Great Zimbabwe that is informed by finds and observations from the entire site and wider landscape. In so doing, the book strongly contributes towards decolonising African and world archaeology. Written in an accessible manner, the book is aimed at undergraduate students, graduate students, and practicing archaeologists both in Africa and across the globe. The book will also make contributions to the broader field such as African Studies, African History, and World Archaeology through its emphasis on developing synergies between local ways of knowing and the archaeology.