Dambuza, Charmaine Kundai (2021) Mourning and melancholia in Zimbabwean culture and cinema. PhD thesis, University for the Creative Arts.
Creators: | Dambuza, Charmaine Kundai |
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Description/Abstract: | This thesis interrogates postcolonial melancholia and femininity through the textual analysis of literary and cinematographic works from Zimbabwe. The work is a transdisciplinary project encompassing psychosocial and postcolonial studies, as well as film and cultural studies. I define post-colonial melancholia in relation to how it has affected the postcolonial social sphere following the independence of Zimbabwe from British colonial rule in April 1980. I characterise melancholia as a loss of identity, ‘the missing object’/ lost object of affection that stemmed from colonial subjugation alongside the little remaining evidence of written Zimbabwean culture before colonialism. Today, there is a fragment of evidence that shows pre colonial Zimbabwean culture: it is forever lost. The colonial era is also relatively sparse regarding its cultural outputs, which is typical of any trauma that is ‘unrepresentable’. It is only recently that some films and plays have begun to address this head on. It is my argument that Zimbabwe is still in a state of melancholia, mourning the loss of her identity. I contend that the notion of identity is not straightforward, but rather is multifaceted and layered in trauma, tribalism, racism, class and sexism. There is, therefore, a need to re-evaluate post-colonial theories in relation to post-colonial melancholia and find the correlation it has in forming a national identity. This thesis also explores the lack of female authorship in literature and film and what this tells us of the role of women in Zimbabwean society. I argue that the black female voice has been silenced through the ions of time and is only being regained very slowly. Thus autoethnography is used here as an anti -patriachal gesture, a resistance tool against the double interpellation black women endured/ are enduring in Zimbabwe. |
Item Type: | Thesis |
Date: | October 2021 |
Depositing User: |
Amy Robinson
|
Date Deposited: | 05 May 2022 16:10 |
Last Modified: | 05 May 2022 16:10 |
URI: | https://research.uca.ac.uk/id/eprint/5739 |
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