ABSTRACT
This chapter examines several critical race theories/perspectives and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony to read the psychology of dispossession in Johnson’s autobiography. It discusses how land loss triggers certain psychological deportments that reveal the enduring coloniality of some of the victims of the Third Chimurenga land grabs. The chapter reviews this coloniality as problematising notions of justice premised on personal loss. It argues that far from justifying the nature and extent of Henry Jackson’s loss which borders on revocation of his citizenship. The chapter explores Jackson’s racial attitude in his narration of race-inspired loss signals the complexity of “imagining a nation” heightened by pervasive considerations of racial difference in acts of laying claim to the symbolic site of belonging, land. It highlights the limits of self-narration in charting white farmer subjectivities. Language was revealed to be an unstable medium of creating, circulating, and maintaining identities shaping out of land loss.
