The heart of the city: postcolonial subjectivities in contemporary zambian women's writing
The heart of the city: postcolonial subjectivities in contemporary zambian women's writing
In international debates about post-colonial writing, Zambian literature is largely invisible - overshadowed (as Zambia is in several other regards) by the powerful regional pull of neighbouring South Africa. Moreover, those critics who have written about Zambian texts from the national and regional perspective have tended to represent them as all-too-often aesthetically wanting (i.e. subordinated to journalistic discourses) and almost entirely consumed by the debate about the relative merits of 'modernity' versus 'tradition', usually imagined as the cultural contrast between the city and the country. This article seeks to bypass those trends. Its focus is a recent collection of short fictions edited by Zambian women, which takes both the complexity and the urban inflections of contemporary Zambian identities for granted. The stories' combination of elements of women's romance narrative with the concept of African urban crisis produces the notion of a certain kind of slipperiness as a key component of both Zambian city life and the emergent national imaginary.
women, cities, urban, culture, zambia, gender, subjectivity
20-31
Primorac, Ranka
8e175d18-8ea8-4228-8637-671427202b10
September 2007
Primorac, Ranka
8e175d18-8ea8-4228-8637-671427202b10
Primorac, Ranka
(2007)
The heart of the city: postcolonial subjectivities in contemporary zambian women's writing.
Scrutiny2, 12 (2), .
(doi:10.1080/18125440701751935).
Abstract
In international debates about post-colonial writing, Zambian literature is largely invisible - overshadowed (as Zambia is in several other regards) by the powerful regional pull of neighbouring South Africa. Moreover, those critics who have written about Zambian texts from the national and regional perspective have tended to represent them as all-too-often aesthetically wanting (i.e. subordinated to journalistic discourses) and almost entirely consumed by the debate about the relative merits of 'modernity' versus 'tradition', usually imagined as the cultural contrast between the city and the country. This article seeks to bypass those trends. Its focus is a recent collection of short fictions edited by Zambian women, which takes both the complexity and the urban inflections of contemporary Zambian identities for granted. The stories' combination of elements of women's romance narrative with the concept of African urban crisis produces the notion of a certain kind of slipperiness as a key component of both Zambian city life and the emergent national imaginary.
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Published date: September 2007
Keywords:
women, cities, urban, culture, zambia, gender, subjectivity
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Local EPrints ID: 79521
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/79521
ISSN: 1812-5441
PURE UUID: b5ea7a3a-cc37-49d4-bdb7-2e935d976604
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Date deposited: 16 Mar 2010
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 02:54
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