This book is the first to tackle the difficult and complex politics of transition in Zimbabwe, with deep historical analysis. Its focus is on a very problematic political culture that is proving very hard to transcend. At the center of this culture is an unstable but resilient ‘nationalist-military’ alliance crafted during the anti-colonial liberation struggle in the 1970s. Inevitably, violence, misogyny and masculinity are constitutive of the political culture. Economically speaking, the culture is that of a bureaucratic, parasitic, primitive accumulation and corruption, which include invasion and emptying of state coffers by a self-styled ‘Chimurenga aristocracy.’ However, this Chimurenga aristocracy is not cohesive, as the politics that led to Robert Mugabe’s ousting from power was preceded by dirty and protracted internal factionalism. At the center of the factional politics was the ‘first family’:Robert Mugabe and his wife, Grace Mugabe. This book offers a multidisciplinary examination of the complex contemporary politics in Zimbabwe, taking seriously such issues as gender, misogyny, militarism, violence, media, identity, modes of accumulation, the ethnicization of politics, attempts to open lines of credit and FDI, national healing, and the national question as key variables not only of a complete political culture but also of difficult transitional politics.

Zimdancehall is a musical movement in Zimbabwe that has grown significantly since 2010. The Zimdancehall Revolution brings together critical essays on various aspects of Zimdancehall culture by scholars from diverse disciplines. Traditionally, music critics and senior academics have not taken Zimdancehall seriously, regarding it as vulgar, transient, bubble gum, lacking depth, and in short, a fad. There were also allegations that the lyrics influenced factionalism, incited violence and glorified drug use and unbridled promiscuity among the youth. This book affords this movement the protracted intellectual engagement that it deserves and argues that Zimdancehall is more than just a musical genre but an everyday culture, a way of life. The genre’s close association with the ghetto is telling and enables critics to look at it as a social movement, a revolution, or a raw, petulant and raging disturbance of peace by those who live their lives on the margins. It is, thus, a violent irruption onto the public space by marginalised young people whose presence as artistes creating art from the margins, simultaneously as victims and agents, circulating in a geography that escapes the limits of nationalist ideological and physical territory, in a way subverts communitarian prescriptions and allows young people entry into the world, albeit in a painful, tumultuous and violent way. The essays range from the mapping of the genre’s historical development to theoretical interventions in understanding the genre and its relationship with various aspects of the Zimbabwean society like politics, gender, religion, language, dance, cultural values and other genres.

This book investigates the role of the internet and social media in political processes in non-western and non-democratic contexts. Using Zimbabwe as a case study, the book demonstrates how activists and ordinary people deploy social media, particularly Facebook, to subvert an enduring hegemonic state. However, the book also highlights how authoritarian regimes are in turn learning and adapting to the information age, challenging the impact of digital activism. Studies of digital activism in the Global South are often centred around democracy, but this book paints a more complex picture, examining the role and effect of digital activism in challenging state hegemony in authoritarian contexts. The book notes that while communication technologies help mediate activism, they are also simultaneously constrained by pre-existing and emergent challenges tied to the social and political context and the inherent limitations of those technologies. The book investigates the tactics used by digital activists, the contextual factors and restrictive political environment they operate in, including the role of pro-government activists, and ultimately, the impact of digital activism given these constraints. From the case of Zimbabwe, the book builds out a broader theoretical analysis of the evolution of ‘third world protest’ in the digital age, examining the limitations of activists’ actions and the ideological deficit in online activism to ferment a virulent counter hegemony.

This book uses decolonisation as a lens to interrogate political communication styles, performance, and practice in Africa and the diaspora. The book interrogates the theory and practice of political communication, using decolonial research methods to begin a process of self-reflexivity and the creation of a new approach to knowledge production about African political communication. In doing so, it explores political communication approaches that might until recently have been considered subversive or dissident: forms of political communication that served to challenge imposed western norms and to empower African citizens and their histories. Centring African scholarship, the book draws on case studies from across the continent, including Zimbabwe, South Africa, Nigeria and Ghana. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, media and communication in Africa. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003111962, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

The Politics of Laughter in the Social Media Age: Perspectives from the Global South brings to critical and intellectual attention the role of humour in the digital era in the Global South. Many citizens of the Global South live disempowered and precarious lives. Digital media and humour, as chapters in the volume demonstrate, have empowered these citizens through engagement with power and their peers, enabling a pursuit of a better future. Contributors to the volume, while alive to challenges associated with the digital divide, highlight the potentials of social media and humour to engage and seek redress on issues such as corruption, human rights violations, racism and sexism. Contributors expertly analyse memes, videos, cartoons and other social media texts to demonstrate how citizens mimic, disrupt, ridicule and challenge status quo. This book caters for academics and students in media and communication studies, political studies, sociology and Global South studies.

This two-volume set charts a cross-disciplinary discursive terrain that proffers rich insights about deceit in contemporary postcolonial Sub-Saharan African politics. In an attempt to produce a nuanced and multi-faceted academic dialoguing platform, the two volumes have a particular focus on the aspects of treachery, fear of difference (oppositional politics), and discourses/ semiotics of mis/self- representation. The major aim of the proposed volumes is to contribute toward the often problematised conversations about the unfolding (post)colonial Sub-Saharan world which is topical in decolonial and Pan-African studies. The volumes seek to place political thinking and postcolonial political systems under the scholarly gaze with the view to highlight and enhance the participation of African cross-disciplinary scholarship in the postcolonial political processes of the continent. Most significantly, it is through such probing of the limitations of our own disciplinary perspectives which can help us appreciate the complexity of the postcolonial Sub-Saharan African politics. The first volume uses Zimbabwe as a case study, while the second volume broadens to examine postcolonial politics in Sub-Saharan Africa more broadly.

Examining this pressing field of study in an underexplored regional context, this book takes a refreshing new angle to deepen our understanding around the causes and effects of migration.

Edited by Lungile Tshuma, Trust Matsilele, Shepherd Mpofu and Mbongeni Msimanga, Media, Social Movements, and Protest Cultures in Africa: Hashtags, Humor, and Slogans provides a rich array of protest cultures in Sub-Saharan Africa, delving into the motivations for protests, how protests are carried out and how those targeted by protests try to undermine the protesting movements. Organized into three parts, this book examines social media and social movements, online protest strategies, and media texts used in various protest movements within Sub-Saharan Africa. The contributors shed light on the brutality of various post-colonial regimes in Africa while also giving the reader hope for the current movements that seek to wrestle their societies from the jaws of autocratic leaders. This book offers a theoretically rich and methodologically diverse engagement of protest cultures in countries like Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. The wide tapestry of how these protests are formulated and executed speaks to Africa's diversity and dynamism. This book makes an important intellectual contribution on social and political movements and is relevant to policy makers and researchers in the social sciences and digital humanities.

This book, Multidisciplinary Knowledge Production and Research Methods in Sub-Saharan Africa: Language, Literature and Religion, contributes to the polemical conversations about existing architectures of knowledge and research practices in postcolonial sub-Saharan Africa. It creates an academic platform for multi-interdisciplinary research that brings to the fore inspiring efforts to break away from long-standing disciplinary bordering thinking and practices in modern-day sub-Saharan Africa. This distinctive edited collection is a valuable resource for scholars, researchers and students of multi-interdisciplinary research across the globe. The volume also promotes wide-ranging research focused on how to address complexities which hamper the promise of multi-interdisciplinary research in contemporary sub-Saharan African contexts. It provides thought-provoking perspectives on academic conversations about the uniqueness of embracing multidisciplinary research. The traditional methods of interpretation are challenged by the radical emerging demand to shift from a mono-disciplinary thinking to a cross-disciplinary epistemic endeavour in order to successfully address unfolding problematic realities that demand the pursuit of novel heuristic terrains.