ABSTRACT
While the use of the term ‘sellout’ is clear in the Marxist political discourse of the ruling party in Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU PF), this chapter particularly focuses on the deployment of the term in the critical analysis of the creative works of Zimbabwean authors. The chapter demonstrates that the connection between literature and politics in the peddling of the sellout trope sanitises an act of imagining away individuals perceived to be detrimental to the nationalist hegemony of the state, an act of imagining away that is both physical and symbolic. This chapter demonstrates how an essentialised discourse of ‘patriot’ and ‘sellout’ is christened in Zimbabwe’s literary realms thereby giving legitimacy to how it is played out on the volatile political terrain of Zimbabwe. This chapter assumes a meta-critical and deconstructionist stance in its attempt to analyse and critique the use of the term by literary critics and academics who assume a political and cultural position that links them to ZANU PF nationalism. An array of major literary writers from Zimbabwe will be used while also focusing on how selected interpretations of their selected texts help in sanitising the sellout trope by literary critics. These include Solomon Mutsvairo, Charles Mungoshi, Dambudzo Marechera and Stanely Nyamufukudza, works previously examined by most of the groundbreaking literary critics of Zimbabwe like Musaemura Zimunya, Rhino Zhuwarara and Lawrence Vambe, among others.
