The Novel in a House of Stone: Re-categorising Zimbabwean Fiction

There are three bodies of novelistic texts that today's Zimbabwe could claim to have produced before independence: novels written by black Zimbabweans, and by white settlers, in their native languages, and those authored by black authors and written in English, published mostly in exile. Since independence in 1980, these three novelistic groupings have been studied in some detail, but critical analyses have always focused on one or two groupings. This article argues for the need to study Zimbabwean fiction in all three groupings systematically and comparatively. Furthermore, it attempts to outline a methodology capable of inflecting race/language binaries with categories of a different order and origin. At the heart of this methodology is an appropriation of the concept of literary function, informed by the work of M. M. Bakhtin, J. Mukarovsky´ and A. Flaker. The article's first section outlines the problem and its context. The second section provides a reading of the pre-independence period in the history of the Zimbabwean novel, as seen through categories related to language and race. The third section attempts to 'collapse' these categories by relating them to the functional and discursive formations of the same period. The final section applies the formations outlined in previous sections to representative novels by Peter Armstrong, Stanlake Samkange and Stanley Nyamfukudza.