Abstract
This study is located at the intersection of literature and political studies with the intention to scrutinise the myriad ways in which Zimbabweans engage in everyday practices of resistance. Drawing discursive entry points from Michel de Certeau’s conceptualisation of resistance, bell hooks’ theorisation of talking back and life at the margin space, as well as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of the subaltern, the present study reflects on and examines the ‘flight’ of citizens from Zimbabwe as acts of everyday resistances which have not been sufficiently attended to in contemporary migration discourses. This study shifts its gaze from official narratives by trying to understand migration as resistance and protest practices deployed by citizens who desert their unhomely home country in order to reprimand, and upset power. This shift is impetus as the study argues that Zimbabwean migrants react to the deeper realities of socio-economic and political precarity. In doing so, migration is understood as protest or refusal to accept socio-political marginality, poverty and subalternity socio-economic inequalities imposed on citizens by power. The analyses of civil resistance dynamics aim to provide new perspectives from which to think about the postcolonial political deceit. For quite some time, Zimbabwean migrants have been a topical subject for the Southern African region. Unfortunately, the socio-economic and political reality that is generated in the corridors of power and prompts civil resistance is often (un)consciously flouted in official discourses at the detriment of finding lasting solutions to the challenges of migrant influx in Zimbabwe’s neighbours and beyond.
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Mavengano, E. (2023). Speaking from Below: Reflections on the Postcolonial Subaltern Practices of Resisting Deceit and Penury in Valerie Tagwira’s Novel, Trapped. In: Mavengano, E., Mhute, I. (eds) Sub-Saharan Political Cultures of Deceit in Language, Literature, and the Media, Volume II. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42883-8_3
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