Grant Hamilton 
Reading Marechera [PDF ebook] 

Variously understood as literary genius and enfant terrible of African literature, Dambudzo Marechera’s work as novelist, poet, playwright and essayist is discussed here in relation to other free-thinking writers.


Considered one of Africa’s most innovative and subversive writers, the Zimbabwean novelist, poet, playwright and essayist Dambudzo Marechera is read today as a significant voice in contemporary world literature. Marechera wrote ceaselessly against the status quo, against unqualified ideas, against expectation. He was an intellectual outsider who found comfort only in the company of other free-thinking writers – Shelley, Bakhtin, Apuleius, Fanon, Dostoyevsky, Tutuola. It is this universe of literary thought that one can see written into the fiction of Marechera that this collection of essays sets out to interrogate.

In this important and timely contribution to African literarystudies, Grant Hamilton has gathered together essays of world-renowned, established, and young academics from Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia in order to discuss the important literary and philosophical influences that course through Marechera’s prose, poetry and drama. From classical allusion to the political philosophy of anarchism, this collection of new research on Marechera’s work makes clear the extraordinary breadth and quality of thought that Marechera brought to his writing.


Grant Hamilton is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of
On Representation: Deleuze and Coetzee on the Colonized Subject (Rodopi, 2011), as well as a number of articles on contemporary African, postcolonial, and world literatures. He is currently working on his second book,
Deleuze and African Literature.

Зміст

Introduction: Marechera & the Outside – Grant Hamilton

A Brotherhood of Misfits: The Literary Anarchism of Dambudzo Marechera & Percy Bysshe Shelley – Tinashe Mushakavanhu

Blowing People’s Minds: Anarchist Thought in Dambudzo Marechera’s
Mindblast – Anias Mutekwa

Grotesque Intimacies: Embodiment & the Spirit of Violence in ‘House of Hunger’ – Anna-Leena Toivanen

Tracing the Stain in Marechera’s ‘House of Hunger’ – Grant Hamilton

Menippean Marechera – Bill Ashcroft

Black, But Not Fanon: Reading
The Black Insider – David Huddart

The Avant-Garde Power of
Black Sunlight: Radical Recontextualizations of Marechera from Darius James to China Miéville – Mark P. Williams

Classical Allusion in Marechera’s Prose Works – Madhlozi Moyo

Revisiting ‘The Servants’ Ball’ – Memory Chirere

Marechera, the Tree-Poem-Artifact – Eddie Tay

Про автора

Tinashe Mushakavanhu is a Junior Research Fellow in African and Comparative Literature at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. He is currently completing a book on the history of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair for Cambridge University Press.