Towards a Double Decolonization: The Construction of a Feminist Subjectivity in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Tambudzai Trilogy

Abstract

This article investigates Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Tambudzai trilogy – Nervous Conditions (1988), The Book of Not (2006), and This Mournable Body (2018) – through the combined lenses of postcolonial theory, Black feminist thought, and intersectionality theory. By building on these overlapping and criss-crossing approaches, it aims to demonstrate that Dangarembga’s trilogy portrays the construction of a female, Black, and authorial identity as a twofold process involving two consecutive elements: first, a critical re-examination of stereotyped images of Black womanhood, and second, the repositioning of the Black female subject within a community of “She-Other[s]” (Braidotti 2011) connected through mutual recognition and shared narratives. On a thematic level, I intend to examine how Dangarembga problematizes assimilation, complicity, and the politics of consent in the Zimbabwean colonial and postcolonial contexts, while reimagining pathways towards Black women’s self-determination and self-representation. Furthermore, I will explore how she represents the female body not only as a “text” that narrates manifold experiences of “double colonization” (Petersen and Rutherford 1986), but also a site of resistance against the sociocultural legacies of colonialism and the patriarchal structures of Shona tradition. From a semio-narratological perspective, I will analyse how focalization, paratextual strategies, semantic isotopies, dialogism, characterization, and narrative voice work together to subvert essentialist and reductionist conceptions of Black femaleness.