Browsing by Author "Dube, Nhlanhla"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The city that billows smoke : a spatial reading of Bulawayo in prose fiction
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Dube, Nhlanhla; Jones, Megan; Bangeni, Nwabisa; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: My study investigates the ways in which Zimbabwe’s second city, Bulawayo, is represented on the page. By reading fiction authored during the ‘lost decade’, I explore images of the city which emanate from novels and short stories from writers in Zimbabwe and abroad. I answer the question, what argument about place is being made when a character is in a particular locale? Theoretically, I deploy Geocriticism in order to show that space is made up of places. This is done by reading sections of the literary city such as the suburb, the Location and the diasporan constituency as parts of a larger whole. The fact that all narratives have to happen somewhere is at the core of the idea that the geographical location ‘where’ narratives occur, is more than just background setting and aesthetic. My exploration of the literary suburb is concerned with concepts of belonging and the racial aspects of city space. I show the importance of walking the suburb and the significance the process of losing home has in defining the 21st century suburb. Through studying the Location, I privilege the importance of places of drink and construction activities in high density living areas, to show how they indicate a spirit of place. To add to this, I also account for the diasporan view in order to see how the idea of the literary city is complicated by the act of diasporic return. Diasporic return unearths versions of the city that exist outside national borders and it highlights that Bulawayo is in conversation with other cities. My project demonstrates the existence of a Bulawayo literary city which has intricate local political realities and socio-economic conditions. This thesis also establishes that readings of the city have to take into account history, politics and geography in order to gauge the conditions under which unique literary cities are formed.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Contest for Space in Zimbabwean Literature. The case of the novel, The Uncertainty of Hope
    (Academia.edu, 2021-06) Dube, Nhlanhla
    The Uncertainty of Hope (2006) by Valerie Tagwira is a novel that offers profound insights into the condition of Zimbabweans during a time of crisis. Muchemwa (2013:128) argues that “Tagwira‘s novel is often read in one of two ways: either as an HIV/AIDS novel focusing on the infection risks faced by women in a patriarchal culture that encourages men to have unsafe sex with multiple partners or as a Murambatsvina novel that opens a unique fictional window onto the massive displacement of people by a black postcolonial government”. The relatively few scholars that have opined on the novel have applied an HIV/AIDS reading.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Enmeshment of Zimbabwean law and literature in Petina Gappah’s Rotten Row (2016)
    (JULACE, 2020) Dube, Nhlanhla
    This article assesses the relationship between Zimbabwean literature and Zimbabwean law. This is done by closely reading two short stories, namely from Petina Gappah’s 2016 anthology “Rotten Row”. A discussion of the ever-burgeoning literature and law movement is conducted in order to situate the article within the broader law and humanities interdisciplinary effort. Images of legal figures and legal institutions are assessed in order to determine the portraits they produce in the fiction. The close relationship of the Zimbabwean court judgement and the judgement as storytelling method in fiction is highlighted and explained. It is concluded that Gappah’s fiction is strongly connected to the law and that this is a deliberate story telling strategy.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Patterson’s pornographic portraits: a deconstruction of the sex scenes in the novel the children of sisyphus
    (AFRICAN JOURNALS ONLINE (AJOL), 2021-06) Dube, Nhlanhla
    The literary depiction of sex, and by extension pornography, in early modern Caribbean literature has been neglected by literary academicians. Using Susan Sontag’s theorisation of the pornographic imagination, this paper analyses sex scenes in Orlando Patterson’s The Children of Sisyphus in order to determine whether or not they could be labelled as ‘pornographic’. The analysis is done with reference to other pornographic texts and novelists from various time periods. The link between literature and pornography is discussed and its relevance to the novel under discussion explained. The sex scenes assessed are pornographic because of the gratuitous nature of the sexual details which amount to a deliberate attempt at sexually arousing the reader. Such gratuitous detail is evident in the obsessive descriptions of the sex scenes, the use of fetish, and literary foreplay.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Towards a Stylistic Re-Reading of John Eppel's Absent: The English Teacher
    (Taylor & Francis, 2017-10-17) Dube, Nhlanhla
    This paper seeks to articulate the reasons behind the structure and style John Eppel employs in his novel Absent: The English Teacher. Approaches to John Eppel’s creative works have been myopic and slight. Attention has not been paid to the technical achievements and the deliberate construction that Eppel uses in his novel Absent: The English Teacher. This paper eschews prior readings of this work in order to formulate a new one based on structure. By dealing with the unusual elements of the novel the paper explains the alternative ways of representation and storytelling found in the novel. The inclusion of certain structural elements in the novel by Eppel is found to be deliberate. It is concluded that the structure of the novel is appropriate to the story because of the occupation of the protagonist. Multi-genre inclusion in the prose of the novel is identified, assessed and the impact towards its contribution to the narrative objectives is highlighted. This paper argues that Eppel should rightly be considered a member of the Zimbabwean literary establishment based on his innovative creativity.