3 research outputs found
Pedagogical memory and the space of the postcolonial classroom : reading Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions
This article addresses issues of the mnemonic space of the literature classroom by
interrogating a classic text of African womenâs writing, Tsitsi Dangaremngaâs Nervous
Conditions (1988) for the ways it speaks about education in 1960s and 1970s late-colonial
Rhodesia. The article suggests that the novel reviews and critiques a number of memorial
strategies that were crucial to the colonial educational system, thereby facilitating a reflexive
application of the novelâs concerns to the contexts in which it is often taught, that of todayâs
postcolonial classrooms. The article seeks to place Dangarembgaâs novel in the context of its
present moment, contemporary South Africa â that of the present criticâs site of practice, both
pedagogical and scholarly, and that of many of this articleâs readers. This present moment, in
turn, is made up the many sites, successive and simultaneous, in which the novelâs work of
memory is being re-activated in the minds of students as readers and writers. Via a dialogue
between the textual past and the pedagogical present, one which is often subject to critical
amnesia, the article seeks to inaugurate a debate on the nature of pedagogical memory in the
space of the postcolonial university or high school literature classroom.http://www.informaworld.com/RSCRhb2013gv201