Manning the Nation. Father Figures in Zimbabwean Literature and Society

Introduction - Manning the Nation

Introduction Manning the Nation KIZITO Z. MUCHEMWA AND ROBERT MUPONDE Masculinity and fatherhood in the context of Zimbabwe is a field of academic study that has suffered long and unnecessary neglect. To some critics , it is a superfluous and vexatious addition to patriarchal strategies of domination that rams another painful nail into the crucified body of feminism . Gender discussions in Zimbabwe traditionally inhabit essentialist spaces from which emerge descriptions and distinctions that stress ideologically inflected binaries, polarities, and exclusions. Zimbabwean scholarship and research on gender studies is currently skewed in favour of one sex and one gender. To discuss one gender usually implies an adversarial existence of unprivileged genders and a definition through negatives of the privileged one. Like the current nationalist political rhetoric on land, sovereignty , and imperialism, it is characterised by its invariable knee-jerk resort to binarising hate speech and hostile name-calling of the other sexes and genders . Scholarly attitudes of this nature have worked well in an atmosphere of crisis and lack, where society is reduced to the functions of oppositions of colonised and coloniser, race and class, sex and gender, poverty and wealth, patriotism and terrorism, sell-outs and party loyalists, survival and death. Such critical practices deny the existence of marginalised and emerging masculinities that also seek to unmask the strategies of domination employed by hegemonic masculinity. Another assumption is that Zimbabwean/African feminism has consistently ameliorative agendas that deconstruct patriarchy without wanting to examine ways in which this embedded feminism shares the same nest(s) and reaps the same benefits with hegemonic masculinity. There are points of convergence. There is need for the complex interlinking of gender studies from a variety of perspectives. Viewing masculinity as embodiment of the ultimate other forecloses the re-territorialisation of gender studies. Debates about gender can only be complete and meaningful when masculinity is brought under close scrutiny as it abuts discussions of other genders. A study of the representations of masculinities, manhood and fatherhood in Zimbabwean literature and society makes it possible to link and enrich productions in various cultural and political fields. In Manning the Nation: Father figures in Zimbabwean literature and society , we view masculinities as sets of ideas that can oppress, repress or liberate , depending on historical and political imperatives. But as ideas and xv practices, masculinities inhabit, and indeed, proliferate in other genders and sexes as well. They are not a monopoly of one biological sex or social construct. Praise Zenenga and Lene Bull Christiansen, in this volume, demonstrate the pervasiveness of these sightings of multiple masculinities in both men and women, and the systematic attribution of masculinities to particular genders, as well as denial and withdrawal of certain qualities associated with being a member of a particular masculinity, at different times and places in culture and society. Zenenga’s chapter is a pained call for suppressed masculinities to find common cause with suppressed femininities in order to unseat oppressive and foreclosing hegemonic masculinities and femininities. Christiansen’s paradoxically titled chapter shares with Zenenga some of his concerns, while giving a detailed and nuanced picture of the contradictory discourses surrounding types of femininity that can negotiate patriarchal masculinities and nest within them rather comfortably . Masculinity, manhood and fatherhood are associated with various cultures of performance cutting across many disciplines and spheres, genders and sexes. The essays in Manning the Nation examine the performance and theorisation of masculinity, manhood and fatherhood from the perspectives of literature , history, politics, and social anthropology. What is salutary about these essays is that they depart from imperial and colonial gender constructions of the African Other that persist in different guises and mutations. Characterised by exoticisation and vilification, they provided grounds for administrative, statutory, and media management of African sexuality and manhood. In Zimbabwe, white European genders, masculinities and sexualities never really became objects of critical investigation, before and after black majority rule. Nor was it ever thought a viable project to develop an inclusive critical scholarly practice on the subject. Contributions by Jane Parpart and Ane Kirkegaard unpick the strategies that underpin powerful traditions across divisions of race, ethnicity, and class. What is often occluded , misrepresented, and simplified are finely nuanced masculinities and femininities whose boundaries are constantly shifting, and whose indebtedness to each other is not sufficiently acknowledged. Most of the contributors challenge the hegemonic strategies that treat Zimbabwean masculinities as homogeneous and univocal. They instead capture the subterranean currents that ripple the beguilingly tranquil surface of the Zimbabwean cultural map. Above all, most contributors...