Strategies of Representation in Auto/biography Reconstructing and Remembering

Strategies of Representation in Auto/biography investigates how selves are represented and reconstructed in selected auto/biographical readings from African literary discourse. It examines how such representations confirm, validate, interrogate and pervade conversations with issues of identity, nation and history. In addition to providing an overview of the multidimensionality of auto/biography, the book also introduces readers to various ways of reading and analysing auto/biographical writings and develops specific perspectives on the genre and views inherently expressed through the re-imagined, re-membered and re-constructed self that speaks through the pages of autobiographical scripting. The focus on auto/biographical writings from southern Africa, specifically South Africa and Zimbabwe, offers a fresh reading of the work of significant figures in the political, economic and sociological spheres of these nation states. This collection shows that auto/biography may be more than simply the representation of an individual life, and that the socio-cultural memory of a people is a core aspect influencing individual self-representation.

Muchativugwa Liberty Hove is a researcher at North-West University, South Africa, currently interested in nation and narration, applied second language studies, autobiographical metissage and critical narrative pragmatism.

Kgomotso Mike Masemola joined the English Department of English Studies at the University of South Africa as an Associate Professor in 2011, having been previously the Head of Department of English at North-West University. His varied publications on cultural memory in South African writing and Afro-African critical studies are shaped on the anvil of Gilles Deleuze's theoretical musings on the assemblage.

1. Fictions of Autobiographical Representations: Joshua Nkomo's The Story of My Life; Maurice Taonezvi Vambe
2. Memory, Gender and Narration: Reconstruction of Subjectivity in Makeba's My Story and Masekela's Still Grazing; Nonhlanhla Dhlamini
3. Imagining The Nation: Autobiography, Memoir, History or Fiction in Peter Godwin's writing; Muchativugwa Liberty Hove
4. Denomi/Nation: Envisioning Possibilities of Re-Constructing an Alternative Zimbabwe in Muzorewa's Rise Up and Walk; Tasiyana D. Javangwe
5. Reading Dzino: Memories of a Freedom Fighter; Arthur P.T. Makanda
6. Vortex of Violence: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Peter Godwin's The Fear; Muchativugwa Liberty Hove
7. 'We Were Little Kings in Rhodesia': Rhodesian Discourse and Representations of Colonial Violence in Kandaya and Let's Don't Go To The Dogs Tonight; Murenga Joseph Chikowero
8. Women Re-defining Themselves in the Context of HIV and AIDS: Insights from Tendayi Westerhof's Unlucky in Love; Anna Chitando
9. Historical Metaphors of the Self: Chimurenga Names as Autobiography; Charles Pfukwa