Zimbabwe has a culture of protest art in theatre with a long history that goes back to the country’s independence from British colonial rule in 1980. However, a culture of subversive art in other artistic genres, such as visual arts, has emerged in recent years. This paper focuses on the fate of two art events, a theatre play and a visual arts exhibition, both closed down and banned in Bulawayo, the country’s second largest city, which is also regarded as the country’s cultural capital. In 2007, The Good...   ⇨ Read more

This paper aims at retracing Ana Blandianaʼs ban from publishing, between 1988 and 1989; it also looks at the way in which the writer managed to elude censorship. Ana Blandiana was banned from publishing during the one and a half year before the end of the communist regime in Romania. The reviews of her last poetry anthology were banned, but not the anthology itself, which was published shortly after the author’s ban from publishing. Ana Blandianaʼs name was allowed to appear in literary studies about...   ⇨ Read more

This paper attempts to demonstrate how Ellison and Morrison’s prose is interwoven with markers of oral literature, oraliture or orature. This oraliture draws upon African culture. To better deconstruct the Africanism or the different fragments of African culture in the fiction of the two writers under study, I focus on Henry Louis Gates's The Signifying Monkey and Jennings' Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa. For example, fairy tales, the sermons of Homer Barbee and the Jazz music of Louis Armstrong, are...   ⇨ Read more

This paper attempts to investigate the prevalence of the novels of the ‘obsessive decade’ in the ’70s, using the means of the quantitative studies and macroanalysis, as they are theorised by Franco Moretti and Matthew L. Jockers. We will focus on how the subversive nature of the novels of the ‘obsessive decade’ can be detected through quantitative analysis of textual structures (thematic, lexis). In the political context of the ’70s, due to the imposing of certain restrictions (we are referring to the July...   ⇨ Read more