Speaking about building Rylands (1960s to 1980s): a Cape Flats history

This article looks at African and black men and masculinities, triangulated desire, race, and subalternity in Charles Mungoshi’s short story collections. It examines the negotiation of desire, and its interface and interplay with power relations and their negotiation in the colonial and postcolonial economies of domination and gender as depicted in the short stories. It uses the Gramscian concept of hegemony, Girard’s mimetic theory of triangular desire, and Sedgwick’s theory of gendered triangular desire, to examine these dynamics. It argues that colonial and postcolonial power and gender relations are negotiated through a complex interplay of desire that cannot all be accounted for by both Girard and Sedgwick’s models, necessitating their modification to deal with the complexity of desire in a colonial and postcolonial context. The short story collections examined span the colonial and postcolonial eras and these are Coming of the Dry Season (1981), Some Kinds of Wounds (1980), and Walking Still (1997).     

Gendered beings,gendered discourses: the gendering of race,colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism in three Zimbabwean novels

This article aims to explore the gendering of race, colonialism and anti colonial nationalism in selected novels from the Zimbabwean literary canon with the view of showing how this gendering affected different facets of colonial life and, by implication, post independence life. It relies on the Gramscian concept of hegemony in terms of how it refers to gender, particularly masculinities. The selected texts, A Son of the Soil by Wilson Katiyo, The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing and Bones by Chenjerai Hove, cover the colonial period from the moment of contact to the early post independence period. The article links the gendered nature of colonialism to the gendered aspects of anti colonial nationalism and shows how the two existed in an oppositional yet ambivalent relationship. This is also manifest in the schizophrenia of the post independence state in modeling itself after its predecessor, its anti colonial rhetoric notwithstanding.