ISBN:
9781847012678
,
1847012671
Language:
English
Pages:
349 Seiten
,
Illustrationen
,
24 cm
Keywords:
Death / Zimbabwe / History / 21st century
;
Funeral rites and ceremonies / Zimbabwe / History / 21st century
;
Collective memory / Zimbabwe
;
Zimbabwe / Politics and government / 21st century
;
Zimbabwe / Colonial influence
;
Mort / Zimbabwe / Histoire / 21e siècle
;
Funérailles / Rites et cérémonies / Zimbabwe / Histoire / 21e siècle
;
Mémoire collective / Zimbabwe
;
Zimbabwe / Politique et gouvernement / 21e siècle
;
Zimbabwe / Influence coloniale
;
Collective memory
;
Colonial influence
;
Death
;
Funeral rites and ceremonies
;
Politics and government
;
Zimbabwe
;
2000-2099
;
History
Abstract:
In 1898, just before she was hanged for rebelling against colonial rule, Charwe Nyakasikana, spirit medium of the legendary ancestor Ambuya Nehanda, famously prophesised that "my bones will rise again". A century later bones, bodies and human remains have come to occupy an increasingly complex place in Zimbabwe's postcolonial milieu. From ancestral "bones" rising again in the struggle for independence, and later land, to resurfacing bones of unsettled wardead; and from the troubling decaying remains of post-independence gukurahundi massacres to the leaky, tortured bodies of recent election violence, human materials are intertwined in postcolonial politics in ways that go far beyond, yet necessarily implicate, contests over memory, commemoration and the representation of the past. In this book Joost Fontein examines the complexities of human remains in Zimbabwe's 'politics of the dead'. Challenging and innovative, he takes us beyond current scholarship on memory, commemoration and the changing significance of 'traditional' death practices, to examine the political implications of human remains as material substances, as duplicitous rumours, and as returning spirits. Linking the indeterminacy of human substances to the productive but precarious uncertainties of rumours and spirits, the book points to how the incompleteness of death is politically productive and ultimately derives from the problematic, entangled excessivities of human material and immaterial existence, and is deeply intertwined with the stylistics of postcolonial power and politics.
Description / Table of Contents:
Introduction -- 1 Liberation Heritage: Bones and the politics of commemoration -- 2 Bones & Tortured Bodies: Corporealities of violence and post-violence -- 3 Chibondo: Exhumations, uncertainty and the excessivity of human materials -- 4 Political Accidents: Rumours, death and the politics of uncertainty -- 5 Precarious Possession: Rotina Mavhunga, politics and the uncertainties of mediumship -- 6 Mai Melissa: Towards the alterity of spirit and the incompleteness of death -- 7 After Mugabe -- Conclusions
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