(Dis)Locations, (Dis) Placements and (Un) Belonging in Zimbabwean White Farmer's Auto/biograhies 1995 to 2010

Abstract

This study interrogates white auto/biography and exposes the ambivalences, ambiguities, paradoxes and dilemmas that arise in the claims for belonging and the premises for the authority behind such claims. It gestures to white autobiography and biography writing as an opening to what in Zimbabwe has been suppressed as dangerous apocryphal writing. The thesis focuses on the interweaving of autobiographies and biographies and that although this interweaving generates polyphonic narratives that refuse totalizing discourse, this compromises claims to belonging by the authors’ claiming to be legitimate figures whose writing espouse the white community’s contestation of the abrogation of their citizenship and mastery in economic production while that legitimacy is queried by counter narratives in the same books. Through poststructuralism, deconstruction and Levinas’s alterity theory, identity and (un)belonging are posed as unstable and schizophrenic. Both autobiography and biography are investigated as already primed to disband centers of totalizing discourses which are discourses that restrict or mute the voice of the subaltern. Identity as heterogeneous is promoted as this thesis privileges identity as provisional and seeks to oppose teleologies and ideological closures. Using the selected texts, the study explores and analyses concepts and conceptualizations of ideology and space, intertextuality as the intersecting of biographies and autobiography, fiction and nonfiction and authorial detachment/attachment.