"Freedom and Dystopia: Dambudzo Marechera (Anti)Nationalist Imagination"

Clare Counihan, 2012-13 Postdoctoral Associate in Women's Studies,earned her PhD in English Literature at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and is Assistant Professor of English at Nazareth College in Rochester, New York. Dambudzo Marechera earned-- and some say cultivated-- the reputation of being the "enfant terrible of African literature." This talk examines the ways in which this identity, an African revision of the tortured Romantic hero/genius, intersects with his critique the utopian imaginings of the postcolonial nation in two of his novels, The House of Hunger (1978) and Black Sunlight (1980). His vision of sexual anarchy both posits a radically free alternative to the heterosexual constraints of the national imagination and raises troubling questions about how exactly women function in this schema.