Exile and Patronage- Making Art in Cities of Refuge

Chenjerai Hove, world-renowned Zimbabwean author, presents a lecture on the subject of his experiences as an exiled author in the United States. Event held at the Graham Center, Modesto Maidique Campus, Florida International University on October 28,2013

From apartheid to Darfur: Africa\u27s struggle against disdain

Preeminent Nigerian novelists Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Chris Abani, exiled writer Chenjerai Hove of Zimbabwe, and Zambian memoirist Alexandra Fuller join Nobel Laureate and BMI Senior Fellow Wole Soyinka and explore the myriad challenges facing Africa today: Why do despots continue to gain and remain in power? Has the legacy of colonialism permanently impaired pan-African unity? To what extent are Africans themselves responsible for solving the continent\u27s seemingly intractable problems? And how should Western nations be held accountable for the war, famine, and genocide that continue to rage

‘AFRICA HAS ERRED IN ITS MEMORY’: EXPLORING CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES IN TEXTS BY PETINA GAPPAH AND YVONNE VERA

In the short story collection Why Don’t You Carve Other Animals (1992) the Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera initiates her construction of alternative historical narratives, particularly ones that are able to voice women’s experiences. Her project of fostering an alternative engagement with Zimbabwean history locates her in a group of writers that have moved away from simple adherence to historical narratives. The importance of addressing the elision of women from history becomes all the more apparent when one considers that the silencing of their voices and the construction of identity has been twofold: identity was shaped by both the imperial discourse of the coloniser and by the patriarchal discourse of men. While women have certainly negotiated these pressures in myriad ways, imperial and patriarchal discourses have established the frameworks within which they were able to construct their identities. The need to create texts that will mirror the experiences of the female subject from their own perspectives is thus an important feminist and post-colonial project. While academic discussions of Vera’s texts have often compared and contrasted her work with male Zimbabwean authors, no work has focussed on analysing her together with one of the most prominent female authors to have emerged from Zimbabwe since Vera herself. This article focuses on Vera’s work and Petina Gappah’s short story collection An Elegy for Easterly (2009) to explore the concerns that these two Zimbabwean authors address in their fiction