Flânerie in Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17159/tl.v58i2.8403

Keywords:

Zimbabwean literature, Valerie Tagwira, mobility, flânerie, urban walking, modernity, gender

Abstract

Valerie Tagwira’s debut novel The Uncertainty of Hope, set in Harare in 2005, depicts the city on the brink of collapse, characterized by the effects of economic crisis and political violence against the urban poor. Political marginalization of the working classes and gender-based violence intersect and diminish the prospects for the social and spatial mobility of the urban poor. In this article I apply the lens of flânerie to the pedestrian movements of Tagwira’s protagonist Onai Moyo, an impoverished woman who makes a living by selling vegetables on Harare’s streets. In order to make a case for Onai’s ‘flânerie against all odds’, I revisit Walter Benjamin’s theorization as well as recent scholarly engagements with flânerie in non-European settings. By giving her protagonist a gaze traditionally associated with a European middle-class urbanity of the 19th century, Tagwira expands a tradition of city writing/walking and, like other contemporary engagements with flânerie, also breathes new life into a concept often pronounced inappropriate or unproductive for readings of non-European literature. 

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Author Biography

Magdalena Pfalzgraf, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany

Magdalena Pfalzgraf is a research associate at the North American Literary and Cultural Studies section of the Department of British, North American, and Anglophone Literatures and Cultures in the Faculty of Philosophy at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany, and an adjunct faculty member at the New English Literatures and Cultures subdivision of the Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Modern Languages at Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany.

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Published

2021-09-01

How to Cite

Pfalzgraf, M. (2021). Flânerie in Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope : . Tydskrif Vir Letterkunde, 58(2), 18–28. https://doi.org/10.17159/tl.v58i2.8403

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Research articles