ABSTRACT

This book examines the ways in which political discourses of crisis and ‘newness’ are (re)produced, circulated, naturalised, received and contested in Post-Mugabe Zimbabwe.

Going beyond the ordinariness of conventional political, human and social science methods, the book offers new and engaging multi-disciplinary approaches that treat discourse and language as important sites to encounter the politics of contested representations of the Zimbabwean crisis in the wake of the 2017 coup. The book centres discourse on new approaches to contestations around the discursive framing of various aspects of the socio-economic and political crisis related to significant political changes in Zimbabwe post-2017. Contributors in this volume, most of whom experienced the complex transition first-hand, examine some of the ways in which language functions as a socio-cultural and political mechanism for creating imaginaries, circulating, defending and contesting conceptions, visions, perceptions and knowledges of the post-Mugabe turn in the Zimbabwean crisis and its management by the "New Dispensation".

This book will be of interest to scholars of African studies, postcolonial studies, language/discourse studies, African politics and culture.

chapter |17 pages

Introduction

Negotiating the Zimbabwean crisis post-Mugabe

part 1|97 pages

Negotiating memories of Mugabe and the past

chapter 1|19 pages

Burying or erasing Mugabe?

A crisis of memory in the New Dispensation

chapter 2|22 pages

Raising her bones

Contextualising the politicisation of Nehanda's legacy in the post-Mugabe era

chapter 3|17 pages

(Un)settling bones

Abstruse liberations and re-gendered commemorations in Panashe Chigumadzi's These bones will rise again

chapter 5|18 pages

Rituals of revolution?

Place renaming and the crisis of transition in Zimbabwe

part 2|87 pages

Discourses of transition and legitimation in popular spaces

chapter 8|18 pages

Social media, COVID-19 and the ‘Second Republic’ in Zimbabwe

Memes as instruments of subversion on President Mnangagwa's Facebook page

chapter 9|18 pages

Song, patriotism and (il)legitimacy

The politics of transition in post-Mugabe Zimbabwe

chapter 10|14 pages

Politics, protest and music in the Second Republic

The subversive aesthetics of Winky D's post-coup songs

part 3|70 pages

Discursive interventions of political transition

chapter 12|15 pages

Bounded reasoning and the complexity of change in governance

Reflections on post-2017 Zimbabwe

chapter 13|16 pages

The New Dispensation and the Second Republic

Discoursing transition in the post-Mugabe era

chapter 14|18 pages

Semanticising the ‘new’ in the New Dispensation

Discourse and the politics of nationalist renewal in post-2017 Zimbabwe