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Ideology, race and place in historical constructions of belonging: the case of Zimbabwe1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2015

SUSAN FITZMAURICE
SUSAN FITZMAURICE*
Affiliation:
School of English, University of Sheffield, Jessop West, 1 Upper Hanover Street, Sheffield S3 7RA, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article explores the ways in which constructions of identities of place are embedded in the ideology of race and social orientation in Zimbabwe. Using newspaper reports, memoirs, speeches, advertisements, fiction, interviews and ephemera produced around key discursive thresholds, it examines the production of multiple meanings of key terms within competing discourses to generate co-existing parallel lexicons. Crucially, labels like ‘settler’, ‘African’ and ‘Zimbabwean’, labels that are inextricably linked to access to and association with the land in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe, shift their reference and connotations for different speakers in different settings and periods. For example, the term ‘settler’, used to refer to white colonists of British origin who occupied vast agricultural lands in colonial Zimbabwe, is appropriated in post-independent Zimbabwe to designate blacks settled on the land in the Fast Track Land Reform Programme. The analysis of semantic pragmatic change in relation to key discursive thresholds yields a complex story of changing identities conditioned by different experiences of a raced national biography.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 19 , Special Issue 2: Sense of place in the history of English , July 2015 , pp. 327 - 354
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

1

I am indebted to Joan Beal for introducing me to Rory Pilossof, whose scholarship on white farmers in Zimbabwe has inspired my historical sociolinguistic work. This article is based on presentations delivered at HiSON in 2011 and at the Late Modern English Conference in Sheffield in 2010.

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