The Politics Of The Dead In Zimbabwe 2000 2020

Innovative and challenging study that provides fresh insights on the anthropology of death and postcolonial politics.In 1898, just before she was hanged for rebelling against colonial rule, Charwe Nyakasikana, spirit medium of the legendary ancestor Ambuya Nehanda, famously prophesised that "my bones will rise again". A century later bones, bodies and human remains have come to occupy an increasingly complex place in Zimbabwe''s postcolonial milieu. From ancestral "bones" rising again in the struggle for independence, and later land, to resurfacing bones of unsettled wardead; and from the troubling decaying remains of post-independence gukurahundi massacres to the leaky, tortured bodies of recent election violence, human materials are intertwined in postcolonial politics in ways that go far beyond, yet necessarily implicate, contests over memory, commemoration and the representation of the past. In this book Joost Fontein examines the complexities of human remains in Zimbabwe''s ''politics of the dead''. Challenging and innovative, he takes us beyond current scholarship on memory, commemoration and the changing significance of ''traditional'' death practices, to examine the political implications of human remains as material substances, as duplicitous rumours, and as returning spirits. Linking the indeterminacy of human substances to the productive but precarious uncertainties of rumours and spirits, the book points to how the incompleteness of death is politically productive and ultimately derives from the problematic, entangled excessivities of human material and immaterial existence, and is deeply intertwined with the stylistics of postcolonial power and politics. Joost Fontein is Professor of Anthropology, University of Johannesburg. He was previously Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging (James Currey, 2015), shortlisted for the African Studies Association 2016 Herskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Pressing and innovative, he takes us beyond current scholarship on memory, commemoration and the changing significance of ''traditional'' death practices, to examine the political implications of human remains as material substances, as duplicitous rumours, and as returning spirits. Linking the indeterminacy of human substances to the productive but precarious uncertainties of rumours and spirits, the book points to how the incompleteness of death is politically productive and ultimately derives from the problematic, entangled excessivities of human material and immaterial existence, and is deeply intertwined with the stylistics of postcolonial power and politics. Joost Fontein is Professor of Anthropology, University of Johannesburg. He was previously Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging (James Currey, 2015), shortlisted for the African Studies Association 2016 Herskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Pressrskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Pressing and innovative, he takes us beyond current scholarship on memory, commemoration and the changing significance of ''traditional'' death practices, to examine the political implications of human remains as material substances, as duplicitous rumours, and as returning spirits. Linking the indeterminacy of human substances to the productive but precarious uncertainties of rumours and spirits, the book points to how the incompleteness of death is politically productive and ultimately derives from the problematic, entangled excessivities of human material and immaterial existence, and is deeply intertwined with the stylistics of postcolonial power and politics. Joost Fontein is Professor of Anthropology, University of Johannesburg. He was previously Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging (James Currey, 2015), shortlisted for the African Studies Association 2016 Herskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Pressing and innovative, he takes us beyond current scholarship on memory, commemoration and the changing significance of ''traditional'' death practices, to examine the political implications of human remains as material substances, as duplicitous rumours, and as returning spirits. Linking the indeterminacy of human substances to the productive but precarious uncertainties of rumours and spirits, the book points to how the incompleteness of death is politically productive and ultimately derives from the problematic, entangled excessivities of human material and immaterial existence, and is deeply intertwined with the stylistics of postcolonial power and politics. Joost Fontein is Professor of Anthropology, University of Johannesburg. He was previously Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging (James Currey, 2015), shortlisted for the African Studies Association 2016 Herskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Pressrskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Pressrskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Pressing and innovative, he takes us beyond current scholarship on memory, commemoration and the changing significance of ''traditional'' death practices, to examine the political implications of human remains as material substances, as duplicitous rumours, and as returning spirits. Linking the indeterminacy of human substances to the productive but precarious uncertainties of rumours and spirits, the book points to how the incompleteness of death is politically productive and ultimately derives from the problematic, entangled excessivities of human material and immaterial existence, and is deeply intertwined with the stylistics of postcolonial power and politics. Joost Fontein is Professor of Anthropology, University of Johannesburg. He was previously Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging (James Currey, 2015), shortlisted for the African Studies Association 2016 Herskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Pressrskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Pressg Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging (James Currey, 2015), shortlisted for the African Studies Association 2016 Herskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Pressrskovits Prize.Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana): University of Johannesburg Press

The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Politics surveys the intersection of heritage and politics today and helps elucidate the political implications of heritage practices. It explicitly addresses the political and analyses tensions and struggles over the distribution of power. Including contributions from early-career scholars and more established researchers, the Handbook provides global and interdisciplinary perspectives on the political nature, significance and consequence of heritage and the various practices of management and interpretation. Taking a broad view of heritage, which includes not just tangible and intangible phenomena, but the ways in which people and societies live with, embody, experience, value and use the past, the volume provides a critical survey of political tensions over heritage in diverse social and cultural contexts. Chapters within the book consider topics such as: neoliberal dynamics; terror and mobilisations of fear and hatred; old and new nationalisms; public policy; recognition; denials; migration and refugeeism; crises; colonial and decolonial practice; communities; self- and personhood; as well as international relations, geopolitics, soft power and cooperation to address global problems. The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Politics makes an intervention into the theoretical debate about the nature and role of heritage as a political resource. It is essential reading for academics and students working in heritage studies, museum studies, politics, memory studies, public history, geography, urban studies and tourism.

"What might it mean to take the dead seriously as political actors?" asks Lia Kent in this exciting new contribution to critical human rights scholarship. In Timor-Leste, a new nation-state that experienced centuries of European colonialism before a violent occupation by Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, the dead are active participants in social and political life who continue to operate within familial structures of obligation and commitment. On individual, local, and national levels, Timor-Leste is invested in various forms of memory work, including memorialization, exhumation, reburial, and commemoration of the occupation's victims. Such practices enliven the dead, allowing them to forge new relationships with the living and unsettling the state-building logics that seek to contain and control them. With generous, careful ethnography and incisive analysis, Kent challenges comfortable, linear narratives of transitional justice and argues that this memory work is reshaping the East Timorese social and political order--a process in which the dead are active, and sometimes disruptive, participants. Community ties and even the landscape itself are imbued with their presence and demands, and the horrific scale of mass death in recent times--up to a third of the population perished during the Indonesian occupation--means Timor-Leste's dead have real, significant power in the country's efforts to remember, recover, and reestablish itself.

A key book on Zimbabwe's industrial policy and the relationship between manufacturing, the state, and economic interest groups.

In late 2017 and early 2018, South Africa and Zimbabwe both experienced rapid and unexpected political transitions. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, the only leader the country had ever known, was replaced in a “soft coup” by his erstwhile vice-president, Emmerson Mnangagwa. Over a twelve-day period in February 2018, South African president Jacob Zuma was prematurely forced from office by his former deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa. The widespread popular rejoicing that accompanied their arrival compounded the shock of these sudden transitions. New Leaders, New Dawns? explores these political transitions and the way they were received. Contributors consider how the former liberation heroes Mugabe and Zuma could have fallen so low; the underlying reasons for their ouster; what happened to their liberation movements turned ruling parties; and, perhaps most importantly, what the rise to power of Ramaphosa and Mnangagwa foreshadowed. Bringing together fourteen leading international scholars of southern Africa, and adopting a political economy framework, this volume argues that the changes in leadership are welcome, but insufficient. While the time had come for Zuma and Mugabe to go, there is little in the personal histories or early policy actions of Ramaphosa and Mnangagwa that suggests they will be capable of addressing the profound social, economic, and political problems both countries face. New Leaders, New Dawns? reveals that despite what these new leaders may have promised, a “new dawn” has not yet arrived in southern Africa.

In Children of the Soil, Tasha Rijke-Epstein offers an urban history of the port city of Mahajanga, Madagascar, before, during, and after colonization. Drawing on archival and ethnographic evidence, she weaves together the lives and afterlives of built spaces to show how city residents negotiated imperial encroachment, colonial rule, and global racial capitalism over two centuries. From Mahajanga’s hilltop palace to the alluvial depths of its cesspools, the city’s spaces were domains for ideological debates between rulers and subjects, French colonizers and indigenous Malagasy peoples, and Comorian migrants and Indian traders. In these spaces, Mahajanga’s residents expressed competing moral theories about power over people and the land. The built world was also where varying populations reckoned with human, ancestral, and ecological pasts and laid present and future claims to urban belonging. Migrants from nearby Comoros harnessed built forms as anticipatory devices through which they sought to build their presence into the landscape and transform themselves from outsiders into "children of the soil" (zanatany). In tracing the centrality of Mahajanga’s architecture to everyday life, Rijke-Epstein offers new ways to understand the relationships between the material world, the more-than-human realm, and the making of urban life.