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Essays
by Tsitsi Dangarembga
The first wound for all of us who are classified as "black" is empire.
In Black and Female, Tsitsi Dangarembga examines the legacy of imperialism on her own life and on every aspect of black embodied African life.
This paradigm-shifting essay collection weaves the personal and political in an illuminating exploration of race and gender. Dangarembga recounts a painful separation from her parents as a toddler, connecting this experience to the ruptures caused in Africa by human trafficking and enslavement. She argues that, after independence, the ruling party in Zimbabwe only performed inclusion for women while silencing the work of self-actualized feminists. She describes her struggles to realize her ambitions in theater, film, and literature, laying out the long path to the publication of her novels.
At once philosophical, intimate, and urgent, Black and Female is a powerful testimony of the pervasive and long-lasting effects of racism and patriarchy that provides an ultimately hopeful vision for change. Black feminists are "the status quo's worst nightmare." Dangarembga writes, "our conviction is deep, bolstered by a vivid imagination that reminds us that other realities are possible beyond the one that obtains."
"Incisive, impassioned essays.... Dangarembga's candid reflections and lyrical prose bring urgency to this thought-provoking argument for political and social equality. Readers won't want to miss this." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"In these probing essays, Zimbabwean novelist and filmmaker Dangarembga examines the impacts of racism, colonialism, and patriarchy on her life and work.... A well-informed, biting analysis of the legacy of empire." - Kirkus Reviews
"Black and Female...represents a rallying cry for the transformative power of writing; not only to help us make sense of our place in the world...but to lend us the imagination and courage to change it." - The Guardian (UK)
"A celebration of artistic creation at the same time as an acknowledgment of unjust worldly realities. [Dangarembga] has a talent for taking activist buzzwords, around women's agency or the importance of decolonizing the canon, and examining how powerful yet difficult it is to pull up the deep structural and psychological roots of patriarchy and empire." - The Observer (UK)
"Urgent, compelling, blisteringly brilliant. This timely and elegant collection should be essential reading for anyone who cares about the aftermath of Empire – and that should be all of us. Tsitsi Dangarembga is one of the most powerful writers working today." - Sara Collins, author of The Confessions of Frannie Langton
"Tsitsi Dangarembga's essential new essay collection blazes with her characteristic intellectual prowess, unstinting honesty, and commitment to personal and political acts of resistance and reclamation." - Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks
"Poignant, profound, essential. The human cost of colonization laid bare."- Audrey Magee, author of The Colony
This information about Black and Female was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Tsitsi Dangarembga lived and studied in both England and Germany before returning to her native Zimbabwe. She is not only a novelist and playwright, but also a noted film director. She currently is working on the third novel in the trilogy that began with Nervous Conditions and continues in The Book of Not.
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