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dc.contributor.authorNiemi, Minna Johanna
dc.date.accessioned2022-01-07T14:13:03Z
dc.date.available2022-01-07T14:13:03Z
dc.date.issued2021-08-11
dc.description.abstractThis article focuses on Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel This Mournable Body (2018), which completes her trilogy on Tambudzai Sigauke’s life story in relation to the neoliberal political order in contemporary Zimbabwe. The country has been recently referred to as cultivating ultra-neoliberal policies, and, in such a framework, state repression becomes replaced by state negligence towards citizens’ economic survival. In This Mournable Body, neoliberalism and the uneven accumulation of wealth are portrayed through the tourism industry. The novel shows deepening forms of injustice and economic discrepancies in neoliberal Zimbabwe, where impoverished groups of people, living in the cities as well as outside them, are compelled to commodify their lives for the needs of the tourism industry in order to get by. In the novel, Tambudzai emerges as an egoistic character, as she epitomises a new type of neoliberal citizen–subject who is ready to maximise her own benefits at the expense of others and whose ambitions remain only in her own career. I analyse her character with regard to the so-called sell-out mentality; however, Dangarembga depicts Tambudzai’s unpatriotic behaviour as a defence mechanism, which finally gives way to full mourning at the end of the novel. Dangarembga’s critical characterisation of the neoliberal forms of capitalism is juxtaposed with her representation of an alternative unhu/ubuntu business model at the end of the novel. However, even if Dangarembga proposes unhu/ubuntu business as a Zimbabwean form of balanced capitalist enterprise, I argue that neoliberal markets are taking advantage of these African forms of capitalism as well. The romanticised ending of the novel slightly undermines its otherwise astute illustration of uneven development in neoliberal Zimbabwe, which contributes to rural and urban poverty, communal rupture and drastic forms of citizen competition.en_US
dc.identifier.citationNiemi MJ. Critical representation of neoliberal capitalism and uneven development in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body. Journal of Southern African Studies. 2021en_US
dc.identifier.cristinIDFRIDAID 1897115
dc.identifier.doi10.1080/03057070.2021.1959118
dc.identifier.issn0305-7070
dc.identifier.issn1465-3893
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10037/23635
dc.language.isoengen_US
dc.publisherRouteledgeen_US
dc.relation.journalJournal of Southern African Studies
dc.rights.accessRightsopenAccessen_US
dc.rights.holderCopyright 2021 The Author(s)en_US
dc.titleCritical representation of neoliberal capitalism and uneven development in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Bodyen_US
dc.type.versionpublishedVersionen_US
dc.typeJournal articleen_US
dc.typeTidsskriftartikkelen_US
dc.typePeer revieweden_US


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