Team > Oliver Nyambi
Oliver Nyambi
Faculty of Languages & Literatures
English Studies and Anglophone Literatures
Biography
Oliver Nyambi is a Zimbabwean citizen and South African Permanent Resident. He teaches Postcolonial African Literatures in the Department of English at the University of the Free State in South Africa. He is currently an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow in Postcolonial African literature. His research focuses on crisis/humanitarian literatures, critical political discourse analysis and onomastics.
Short CV
BA. Hons. In English (University of Zimbabwe, 2006);
MA. In English (University of Zimbabwe, 2008);
Topic: Politics and the novel: A study of three Zimbabwean novels (half thesis)
PhD in Literary Studies (University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, 2013)
Topic: “Nation in crisis: Literary representations of Zimbabwe post-2000”
Faculty of Languages & Literatures
English Studies and Anglophone Literatures
Postdoctoral Research
Monograph title: The postcoloniality of liberation in the twenty-first century Zimbabwean political autobiography
Abstract
In 2004, when what has become known as the “Zimbabwean crisis” was still in its nascent stages, the historian Terrence Ranger coined the term "patriotic history" to describe the ruling party and former liberation movement ZANU PF's intensifying authorial stranglehold on the narrative of becoming and being Zimbabwe. Apart from opposition establishments, patriotic history – and the political legitimacy it bestowed on its authors – has come under subtle scrutiny from artists, especially, one may argue, writers. Inspired by yet going beyond Mbembe’s postcolonial notion of power as a fetish, this study focuses on the ways in which personal and personalised memory in post-2000 political autobiographies produces a liberation discourse that relates to the state’s master fiction of liberation, in ways that can illuminate various strands of the postcoloniality of liberation in Zimbabwe, especially in the context of the unravelling economic and political crisis in the country. The study will argue that post-2000 Zimbabwe is marked by heightened hegemonic attempts by ZANU PF to prescribe and circumscribe the meaning and political capital of liberation. In a context in which the expressive space is legally constrained and panoptically surveilled by the state, the study explores the various ways in which the political autobiography can be read alongside other modes of cultural texts and performances, as a critical space for a renewed discourse on the politics of liberation in Zimbabwe.
Faculty of Languages & Literatures
English Studies and Anglophone Literatures
Oliver Nyambi
Postdoctoral researcher
Room: 1.28 (Building: Zapf 1. Gebäude)
Phone: +49 (0)921 / 55-4662