Strategies of Representation in Auto/biography [electronic resource] : Reconstructing and Remembering /
Hove, Muchativugwa.editor.
Masemola, Kgomotso.editor.
Strategies of Representation in Auto/biography investigates how selves are represented and reconstructed in selected auto/biographical readings from African literary discourse. It examines how such representations confirm, validate, interrogate and pervade conversations with issues of identity, nation and history. In addition to providing an overview of the multidimensionality of auto/biography, the book also introduces readers to various ways of reading and analysing auto/biographical writings and develops specific perspectives on the genre and views inherently expressed through the re-imagined, re-membered and re-constructed self that speaks through the pages of autobiographical scripting. The focus on auto/biographical writings from southern Africa, specifically South Africa and Zimbabwe, offers a fresh reading of the work of significant figures in the political, economic and sociological spheres of these nation states. This collection shows that auto/biography may be more than simply the representation of an individual life, and that the socio-cultural memory of a people is a core aspect influencing individual self-representation.
Description based upon print version of record.
Includes bibliographical references at the end of each chapters and index.
Cover; Contents; Acknowledgements; Notes on Contributors; Introduction; 1 Fictions of Autobiographical Representations: Joshua Nkomo's The Story of My Life; 2 Memory, Gender and Narration: Reconstruction of Subjectivity in Makeba's My Story and Masekela's Still Grazing; 3 Imagining the Nation: Autobiography, Memoir, History or Fiction in Peter Godwin's Writings; 4 Denomi/Nation: Envisioning Possibilities of Reconstructing an Alternative Zimbabwe in Muzorewa's Rise Up and Walk; 5 Reading Dzino: Memories of a Freedom Fighter
6 Vortex of Violence: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Peter Godwin's The Fear7 "We Were Little Kings in Rhodesia": Rhodesian Discourse and Representations of Colonial Violence in Kandaya and Let's Don't Go to the Dogs Tonight; 8 Women Re-defining Themselves in the Context of HIV and AIDS: Insights from Tendayi Westerhof's Unlucky in Love; 9 Historical Metaphors of the Self: Chimurenga Names as Autobiography; Index
Strategies of Representation in Auto/biography investigates how selves are represented and reconstructed in selected auto/biographical readings from African literary discourse. It examines how such representations confirm, validate, interrogate and pervade conversations with issues of identity, nation and history. In addition to providing an overview of the multidimensionality of auto/biography, the book also introduces readers to various ways of reading and analysing auto/biographical writings and develops specific perspectives on the genre and views inherently expressed through the re-imagined, re-membered and re-constructed self that speaks through the pages of autobiographical scripting. The focus on auto/biographical writings from southern Africa, specifically South Africa and Zimbabwe, offers a fresh reading of the work of significant figures in the political, economic and sociological spheres of these nation states. This collection shows that auto/biography may be more than simply the representation of an individual life, and that the socio-cultural memory of a people is a core aspect influencing individual self-representation.
Sociolinguistics.
Literature.
Ethnology-Africa.
Sociolinguistics.
Literature, general.
African Culture.