The Art of Survival

Depictions of Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwean in Crisis

Edited By: Joseph Chikowero, Anna Chitando, Angeline M. Madongonda, Government Phiri

£47.99

Offering an examination of a period against which development in Zimbabwe is often measured, this title offers insights into how ordinary Zimbabweans battled the odds by making startling innovations in language use to legitimize new survival strategies.

The Art of Survival: Depictions of Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwean in Crisis offers a fresh, interdisciplinary examination of a period against which development in Zimbabwe…

The Art of Survival: Depictions of Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwean in Crisis offers a fresh, interdisciplinary examination of a period against which development in Zimbabwe is often measured, one epitomized by the severe shortages and runaway inflation of 2008. While journalistic stories of the 1998–2008 era often privilege the reductive stories of woe, defeat and crushed hopes, this volume explores how survival was still possible in those circumstances.

The book offers insights into how ordinary Zimbabweans battled the odds by making startling innovations in language use to legitimize new survival strategies, how they weaved new songs and reinterpreted old ones to fight for survival, how social institutions such as churches reinterpreted popular gospel, and how authors, playwrights and dramatists crafted works that acknowledge the unprecedented difficulties and yet find humour, laughter and love in unusual places. This work will appeal to both scholars, who will appreciate the depth of the analysis, and the general reader.

Anna Chitando received her doctorate in English Studies from the University of South Africa. She is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Languages and Literature in the Faculty of Arts and Education at the Zimbabwe Open University. Her research interests include African literature, children’s literature and gender studies. She is the author of Fictions of Gender and the Dangers of Fiction in Zimbabwean Women’s Writings on HIV and AIDS (2012), in addition to articles in several refereed journals and chapters in various books.

Joseph Chikowero received his PhD in African Languages and Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, with a dissertation on memory, violence and narration in Zimbabwean and South African writing and films of the liberation struggles. Previously, a teacher of English and Communication Studies at the Zimbabwe Open University, he holds an MA in English from the University of Zimbabwe. In 2011, he co-edited Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives with Peter Orner and Annie Holmes, an oral history of Zimbabwe’s decade of crisis. Chikowero has published scholarly articles on African children and juvenile literature, popular music and governance, film and political auto/biography in Sankofa: A Journal of African Children and Juvenile Literature, and Muziki: A Journal of Music Research in Africa.

Angeline M. Madongonda holds an MA in English, and is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Languages and Literature of the Faculty of Arts and Education at the Zimbabwe Open University. Her publications include “The Language of Pain: (Re) Interpreting Nature as Metaphor in Yvonne Vera’s Under the tongue” in Emerging Perspectives on Yvonne Vera (edited by Pauline Dodgson-Katiyo and Helen Cousins, 2012). Her research interests include subaltern voices, HIV and AIDS in Zimbabwean and African literature, and traditional folklore in contemporary writing.