Maurice Vambe – författare

European and African works have found it difficult to move past the image of Africa as a place of exotica and relentless brutality. This book explores the status and critical relationship between politics, culture, literary creativity, criticism, education and publishing in the context of promoting Africa’s indigenous knowledge, and seeks to recover some of the sites where Africans continue to elaborate conflicting politics of self-affirmations. It both acknowledges and steps outside the protocols of analysis informed by nationalism, differentiating the forms that postcolonial theories have taken, and arguing for a selective appropriation of theory that emerges from Africa’s lived experiences.

Performing Zimbabwe presents a transdisciplinary analysis of Zimbabwean music, drawing from different disciplines such as sociology, ethnomusicology, history, journalism, development studies, English, philology and drama. It offers a re-evaluation of Zimbabwean music by Zimbabwean scholars and, in so doing, reconsiders the work of international academics on the subject.Thus, the book highlights the significance of local scholars in the study of Zimbabwean music. Given that this book features a wide range of perspectives, it provides a solid foundation for future studies on Zimbabwean music, either historically in the precolonial and colonial periods, or in the contemporary postcolonial period.