Crime fiction, South Africa : a critical introduction

Crime fiction is an emergent category in South African literary studies. This introduction positions South African crime fiction and its scholarship in a global lineage of crime and detective fiction. The survey addresses the question of its literary status as ‘highbrow’ or ‘lowbrow’. It also identifies and describes two distinct sub-genres of South African crime fiction: the crime thriller novel; and the literary detective novel. The argument is that South African crime fiction exhibits a unique capacity for social analysis: a capacity which is being optimised by authors and interrogated by scholar

"The Place of the Woman is the Place of Imagination": Yvonne Vera Interviewed by Ranka Primorac

This is an interview with the late, great Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera

The poetics of state terror in twenty-first century Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe’s ‘patriotic history’ the official state ideology of the new millennium conforms to Achille Mbembe’s theorization of a postcolonial ‘master fiction’ as the state’s attempt to create its own world of meaning, whichseeks to govern the production of all other socially produced meanings. The Zimbabwean master fiction is an accumulation of distinct narrative segments with separate official designations. The takeover of rural farmland (the so-called ‘Third Chimurenga’) was recently followed by an urban supplement operation Murambatsvina, or ‘sweeping out the filth’. The article is centrally preoccupied with the generic properties of Zimbabwe’s master fiction, claiming that in narrative terms it corresponds to what has been called the adventure narrative of ordeal. Furthermore, the current ‘patriotic’ master fiction may be seen to have been anticipated, rehearsed and reinforced by popular adventure novels of ordeal published locally since 1980 and written by authors such as Garikai Mutasa, Edmund Chipamaunga, Rodwell Machingauta, Lilian Masitera and Claude Maredza. The existence of a ‘popular’ public realm that is in contact with the domain of political discourse, with which it may be exchanging textual strategies, helps to explain why the implementation of the current master fiction has been so successful. The article examines the key generic and narrative properties of the Zimbabwean state fiction with reference to both a representative sample of popular novels and non-fictional texts generated by the state

The place of tears: the novel and politics in modern Zimbabwe

The book is a re-theorisation of the Zimbabwean literary field, written against the background of ongoing “fast-track” land re-appropriations of the early 2000s. The key works by Chenjerai Hove, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nozipo Maraire, Shimmer Chinodya, Alexander Kanengoni and Yvonne Vera are analysed in detail. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 42 (2), 2007, states: “Primorac’s monograph emerges as the most significant and wide-ranging account of [Zimbabwe’s] recent fiction”; Neil ten Kortanaar’s review in Interventions 10 (2), 2008, calls it “an important and very illuminating book

Nation, detection and time in contemporary Southern African fiction

This book chapter scrutinises the construction of nation, detection and time in thrillers from contemporary Zimbabwe and Zambi

The circularity of the perverse: Zimbabwean post-independence masculinity in Mungoshi's "The Hare"

This chapter analyses a short story by Charles Mungoshi with the help of Jonathan Dollimore's understanding of 'the perverse'

Zimbabwe’s fictions and rebellious entextualisation: ‘[A]ll the xenophobia, hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia and yugoslavia’

The article comparatively scrutinizes the world-making potential of two Zimbabwean novels(Chenjerai Hove’s 1988 Bones and Brian Chikwava’s 2009 Harare North) against thebackground of, on the one hand, the official naming codes and practices of the Mugabeiststate, and on the other, the emergent critical orthodoxy regarding the about-turn in theworldly orientation of Zimbabwe’s fiction since the political turmoil of 2000s. I argue thatthere is in fact a discernible strand of continuity between the cosmopolitan-nationalistinscriptions each novel performs, and that the textual dialogue between what I call theirrebellious entextualisations troubles and interrupts the worlds of necropolitan naming

The novel in a house of stone: re-categorising Zimbabwean fiction

This article re-conceptualises the literary field of postcolonial Zimbabwe