Zimbabwean short stories in English: An Exploration of Post - 2000 Narratives

Abstract

This thesis explores selected post-2000 Zimbabwean short stories in English from edited and individually authored anthologies dealing with what has been called the Zimbabwean crisis. An upsurge in the publication of these short stories from the year 2000 in Zimbabwe is a phenomenon that deserves critical literary attention, yet there has been very little critical work, if any, to date, that refers to the short story genre in its peculiarity. Most of the selected stories are commenting on the turbulent “crisis period” in Zimbabwe that began in 1997 and climaxed in 2008 and was subsequently followed by the so-called “Transitional Period” from 2009 onwards through a deployment of various short story stylistic techniques. Representing the crisis in fictional narratives occupies a contested and discursive space in debates about the post- 2000 Zimbabwean crisis and so-called Zimbabwe’s “lost-decade”. Based on the textual analysis approach, the eclectic theoretical framework was adopted in the thesis thereby providing the researcher with a favourable critical position to evaluate the representation of the crisis in Zimbabwe in the post-2000 period from various theoretical perspectives. Through an application of Bakhtin’s chronotope theory as the overarching theory, this thesis contends that, taken at one level to mean the organisation of value-laden space-time in a literary text, and also at another level, the spatio-temporal relationship between a text and its socio-historical context, the chronotope concept is useful in analysing the selected short stories. The study uses various strands of post-colonial theory to think through the selected fictional texts. The study argues that the potential in literary works, particularly the short story, to deconstruct and transform dominant elitist narratives of the crisis and offer alternative and more representative narratives of the excluded groups’ experiences is made possible through an affective appeal. In addition, the encoding of time in fiction is indissolubly linked to the writer’s literary intent, for he/she exists in a particular time-space, whether in the homeland or the Diaspora. All these aspects are connected and their space-time configurations as experienced or imagined in actual life are artistically embellished and give rise to an identifiable genre, certain narrative structures, themes, chronotopes, and smaller chronotopical scenes and motifs vis-à-vis the Zimbabwe crisis.