Theorising Zimbabwe post-2017: a literary and imaginative perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT International and Zimbabwean scholars have correctly interrogated the negative consequences of the 16 November 2017 military coup in Zimbabwe by Emmerson Mnangagwa. Debating Zimbabwean politics post-2017 has also meant emphasising the continuation of Robert Mugabe’s politics imagined as unproblematically overflowing into the Mnangagwa post-2017 era. Critics from the social sciences continue to underplay the uniqueness of Mnangagwa’s coup in its precedent-setting politics currently dragging Zimbabwean citizens into uncharted political territory. How do scholars imagine Zimbabwe moving beyond the cycle of violence born of a coup and enforced on its citizens by an intolerant ‘new’ dispensation? This study uses the creative agency of the anxious and unstable narratives of imaginative literature to unpack the symbolically unsaid implications of the military coup and its aftermath. A textual and close reading of NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel Glory (2022) suggests that interpreting imaginative literary metaphors contributes to generating subjective and incendiary narratives that imagine the possibility to think beyond new forms of authoritarianism post-2017. The argument in this article is that the cultural uniqueness of the literary narratives in Glory lies in how they generate literary contexts that revise narratives on post-2017 Zimbabwe in current social science-based scholarship.