Irikidzayi Manase

This study examines texts describing the nature of the land invasions and their impact on the perception of land and the constitution of imaginaries on identities and social memory in post-2000 Zimbabwe. The fictional and non-fictional narratives—mostly written by white commercial farmers and people with ties to the land under siege—and other media, political, and cultural texts produced by the government and ordinary citizens are examined from a postcolonial perspective. The study considers the significance of historical, ideological, social, and spatial divisions in shaping the writers’, and other citizens’, experiences on and off the land. The work is also concered with contestations between white farmers and the state, and between the opposition and the ruling party, over perceptions of the land and its ownership, as well as the construction of social and national identities within the current postcolonial condition characterised by a Euro-American global domination.