Zimbabwean Women Writers Writing the Nation

Section A: Literary Counter-Archives and Gendered Nationhood 

1. Introduction: Zimbabwean Women Writers: Writing the Nation

Maurice T. Vambe

2. Culture, nation and critique: Authorial identification with deformed bodies in the writings of Yvonne Vera

Liberty Muchativugwa Hove

3. Narratives of health, wellbeing, and the Zimbabwean woman’s aesthetic: Some critical conversations with author Valerie Tagwira

Nelson Mlambo and Sarah Mlambo

4. Writing, Mobility and Publishing: A conversation with Samantha Rumbidzai Vazhure

Tanaka Chidora

5. Fragmented Love, Fractured Nation: A Postcolonial Feminist Analysis of Irene Sabatini’s The Boy Next Door and An Act of Defiance

Tsiidzai Matsika

6. Writing the Ruined Nation: Women, Memory, and Zimbabweanness in NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory

Thabisani Ndlovu

Section B: Disrupting Patriarchy: Gender, Sexual Politics and Feminist Resistance 

7. “Varume imbwa” (Men are dogs)? A poststructural and postcolonial feminist reading of Sue Nyathi’s The Polygamist (2020)

Collen Sabao

8. ‘We have the power to speak!’: Gender, nation and the politics of subaltern voice in Virginia Phiri’s Grey Angels

Esther Mavengano

9. Mapping Oppression: Interfacing Gender, Resistance and Power in Yvonne Vera’s Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals

Anna Chitando and Angeline M. Madongonda

10. The metamorphosis of the body in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body

Penelope T. Midzi and Nelson Mlambo

11. Desperate situations call for desperate measures: The plight of Zimbabwean Women and Girls in Virginia Phiri´s Desperate (2002)

Sophia Chirongoma &Vimbai Moreblessing Matiza

Section C: Diaspora, Memory and Postcolonial (Un)Belonging 

12. Zimbabwean Female Writing on Trauma: Desecrated, yet Survivalist Bodies in Novuyo R. Tshuma’s House of Stone and NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory

Jairos Gonye & Nathan Moyo

13. Haunting Histories: Memory, Identity, and the Reimagining of Nationhood in Petina Gappah’s (2015) The Book of Memory

Elda Hungwe

14 “Ain’t I a Citizen?” Rewriting the Postcolonial Nation through the Female Voice and Body in Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and Black and Female.

Karuna Datta-Bhatnagar

Section D: Decolonial Re/Visions and Intersectional Futures 

15. Epistolary nation-making and transnational feminist rewritings of Zimbabwe in Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter

Esther Mavengano & Thabisani Ndlovu

16. Of Entanglements and Intersections: Masculinities, Race, Ethnicity and Nation in Irene Sabatini’s The Boy Next Door

Anias Mutekwa

17. Rewriting the unfinished nation: Zimbabwean women’s writing as archive, method and ethical future

 Esther Mavengano 

18. Final Coda

Esther Mavengano

Biography

Esther Mavengano (Ph.D.) teaches Linguistics and Literature in the Department of English and Media Studies, Faculty of Arts at Great Zimbabwe University in Masvingo, Zimbabwe. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics and Literary studies obtained from North West University in South Africa. She is a former Georg Forster/ Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at TU (Technische Universität Dresden) in the Department of English, Faculty of Linguistics, Literature and Cultural Studies, Institute of English and American Studies, Dresden, Germany. Currently, she is a Research Fellow in the Department of English (Arts), in the Faculty of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences at Walter Sisulu University, Mthatha Campus, South Africa Walter Sisulu University in South Africa. She has co-edited 13 books. 

Collen Sabao (Ph.D.) is an Associate Professor of Linguistics, Literature and Communication in the Languages and Literature Department at the University of Namibia. As a lecturer and researcher, Prof. Sabao’s research interests lie in the areas of Phonetics and Phonology, Political Discourse, Media Discourse, Pan Africanism, Afrocentricity, Appraisal Theory, Argumentation, World Literatures and Rhetoric. He has published extensively in these areas, with articles and chapters in internationally refereed publications. His latest publication is Language Matters in Contemporary Zimbabwe (Routledge, 2024) - a book co-edited with Esther Mavengano. He holds a PhD in African Languages (Applied Linguistics) from Stellenbosch University (South Africa) and a Postgraduate Diploma in Higher Education from the International University of Management (Namibia). He is also an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow’14 and an African Humanities Fellow ‘14. 

Maurice Taonezvi Vambe is a Full Professor, an African literary scholar, cultural theorist, and teaches in the English Studies at the University of South Africa (UNISA). He has guest edited Imbizo: International Journal of African Literary and Comparative Studies and the Journal of Literary Studies. Vambe published more than 70 peer-reviewed scholarly articles and contributed book chapters to The Encyclopaedia of African Literature and The Oxford Companion to African Literature.  His African Oral Story Telling Tradition in the Zimbabwean Novel in English came out in (2004). Vambe co-authored Close to the Sources: Essays on Contemporary African Culture, Politics and Academy (Routledge 2011) with Abebe Zegeye. Vambe co-edited Zimbabwe: The Mighty Fall of a type of Nation State (2019) with Gadzikwa, and then co-edited Mozambique is Burning: Islamic Insurgency in Cabo Delgado (2022) with Saurombe and Ruhanya. Professor Vambe’s Genocide in African Literature is in print with Africa World Press (2025).