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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|97 pages
Negotiating memories of Mugabe and the past
chapter 2|22 pages
Raising her bones
chapter 3|17 pages
(Un)settling bones
chapter 4|19 pages
The toponymic undoing of Grace Mugabe and the G40 narrative in the New Dispensation
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
chapter 9|18 pages
Song, patriotism and (il)legitimacy
chapter 10|14 pages
Politics, protest and music in the Second Republic
part 3|70 pages
Discursive interventions of political transition