Philosophiae Doctor - PhDThis thesis examines how “unhomeliness” in a Zimbabwean context enjoins mobility
and the diasporic particularities that manifest as subjects move back and forth in a homemaking
journey between the country-side and the urban, as well as mobility to foreign
countries and back to the homeland. Particularities of inclusion and exclusion,
(re)emplacement, (re)identity, assimilation, rejection and (un)belonging, all loom large as
mobility, paradoxically, takes root and comes to shape experience in as significant a way as
being in a homeland or hostland. This thesis is also about the ways in which the “diasporic”
settler, in one of the novels which destabilises the familiar paradigms of diasporic literature,
can exist and be dominant in the foreign but colonised spatial setting without needing to
assimilate, and how this attempt to territorialise can traumatise those marginalised by the
settler community. Since the end of the twentieth century, there has been a rise in the
significance of space in humanities and literary studies. Theories about diaspora, identity and
belonging have featured strongly in works of scholars of space and place such as Henri
Lefebvre, Yi-Fu Tuan, Doreen Massey, Edward Soja, Tim Cresswell, Nigel Thrift, Robin
Cohen, John Agnew, and Kelly Baker. Space is largely regarded as a dimension within which
matter is located
