Engendering modern spaces: female voices, male nationalisms, and cosmopolitan counter-modernity in Yvonne Vera's The Stone Virgins

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the coded and covered spaces of female modernity in Yvonne Vera's novel, The Stone Virgins. While many scholars have examined this novel as participating in a diaspora counter-modernity, I argue that the novel questions the utility of global translations of the local self. Instead, Vera offers a local fashioning of the “new” self that bears the traces of female participation in the definition of the public spaces of the new nation. Through careful attention to musical performance and representations of female combatants immediately preceding, during and after the Chimurenga, I argue that Vera's novel asks us to remember how women participated in the struggle to define a Zimbabwean modernity, even while their contributions were being “read” as masculine performance.