Mobility in Contemporary Zimbabwean Literature in English

Magdalena Pfalzgraf is W1-Juniorprofessor of English Studies at the Rhenish Friedrich Wilhelm University of Bonn. She is co-editor of Matatu. Journal for African Culture and Society.

"Magdalena Pfalzgraf ’s Mobility in Contemporary Zimbabwean Literature in English is an important contribution to the scholarship on Zimbabwean literature and mobility. The book brings into sharp focus how mobility permeates the works of selected Zimbabwean authors and shapes their overall vision of what is commonly referred to as the Zimbabwean crisis…Mobility in Contemporary Zimbabwean Literature invites the reader to see the postcoloniality of Zimbabwean texts on mobility, albeit ones which write back to a metanarrative of place, time, and belonging authored by an authoritarian African regime. Depictions of movement and the ways protagonists engage with multiple spaces mimic the political forms of resistance which preoccupied the African resistance literatures of the 1960s and 1970s. Through a reconceptualization of mobility and a fresh reading of Zimbabwean texts, Pfalzgraf demonstrates what she calls "the subversive and liberatory potential" of literary mobilities."Cuthbeth Tagwirei, University of the Witwatersrand"Pfalzgraf’s book is an excellent addition to scholarship on mobilities in literature and to the fields of Zimbabwean and African literary studies. Through her inquisitive close readings, readers will gain insight into the tensions, complexities, and contradictions that shape literary texts in contemporary Zimbabwe. Her analysis of Shimmer Chinodya’s Strife is particularly discerning, identifying mutually exclusive impulses regarding mobility at work in the text. Pfalzgraf’s deep engagements therefore reveal subtleties that require familiarity with existing political conditions and national narratives as well as a keen eye for literary strategies that can, at least to some extent, question and subvert the official story."Michelle Stork, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Am Main"[Mobility in Contemporary Zimbabwean Literature] offers a way out of the trap of “monological approaches which see the literary system as uniform, static and closed” (Tagwirei, “White Zimbabwean Writing” 5). By including texts by white writers in her study, Pfalzgraf breaks the artificial internal borders of the Zimbabwean literary canon; in Zimbabwean literary criticism influenced by the Third Chimurenga, white writing is marginalized and often viewed as not Zimbabwean. Critical studies by non-Zimbabwean whites are also viewed as suspect, Eurocentric and not suited to addressing the demands of the ultra-nationalistic agenda. In this context, Pfalzgraf’s book is a brave assertion that history, culturalproduction, and national identity need to be “re-theorized as multiple, in the torsions and tensions of different, sometimes incompatible, perspectives, stories, times” (Young, White Mythologies 3)."Kizito Zhiradzago Muchemwa, Postcolonial Text 4 Vol 18 No 3 (2023), Zimbabwe"Magdalena Pfalzgraf’s book Mobility in Contemporary Zimbabwean Literature is a breath of fresh air. Pfalzgraf’s monograph makes an astute contribution to literary scholarship focused on Zimbabwean literature. Pfalzgraf expatiates migration as the number one issue that has beleaguered both the nation and its literature since the early 2000s to date. [...] individual lovers of Zimbabwean literature will do well to get this text and add it to their collections as a rare example of sober and scholarly Zimbabwean literary criticism."Nhlanhla Dube, Research in African Literatures, Vol 53, No 4, (2023), South Africa"Pfalzgraf makes a convincing case for reading twenty-first-century Zimbabwean literature through the concept of mobility as it relates to the frequent movements of Zimbabwe’s population throughout its history, but also specifically in relation to a large so-called out-migration connected to the economic and political unrest of the Zimbabwean Crisis. [...] Particularly astute are her observations of the ‘coexistence of stasis and mobility found in many literary engagements with the Zimbabwean Crisis’ (p. 130), which she calls ‘frantic stasis’ (p. 243). This resists any simplistic understanding and can function in various ways: for example, movement can signify a lack of progression ‘socially, economically, or spatially’ (p. 130). Literature’s resistance to authoritarian spatial control is funnelled through two motifs in particular. Firstly, that of ‘countermobilities’— that go ‘against the grain of local spatial orders’ and ‘conventional understandings of “African migration”’ (p. 248). And secondly, the motif of ‘micropolitics of place’, which focuses on small personal moves of resistance (p. 248)."Gall, A., Manzo, K., Mcneill, D., Miller, B., Naruse, C. N., Niblett, M., ... & Zirra, M. (2023). XVII New Literatures. The Year’s Work in English Studies, 102(1)

• 1. Introduction 2. Zimbabwean Mobility Dynamics in the Twenty-First Century 3. Spatial Orders and Mobility in a Shifting National Landscape 4. Intra-Urban Mobilities 5. Rural-Urban Dynamics 6. Transnational Migrations Between Zimbabwe and South Africa 7. Transcontinental Migrations to the West 8. Conclusion