Black and Female, Tsitsi Dangarembga
Black and Female, Tsitsi Dangarembga
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Black and Female
Essays

Author: Tsitsi Dangarembga

Narrator: Chipo Chung

Unabridged: 3 hr 52 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/16/2023


Synopsis

The first wound for all of us who are classified as "black" is empire.

In Black and Female, Tsitsi Dangarembga examines the legacy of imperialism on her own life and on every aspect of black embodied African life. This paradigm-shifting essay collection weaves the personal and political in an illuminating exploration of race and gender. Dangarembga recounts a painful separation from her parents as a toddler, connecting this experience to the ruptures caused in Africa by human trafficking and enslavement. She argues that, after independence, the ruling party in Zimbabwe only performed inclusion for women while silencing the work of self-actualized feminists. She describes her struggles to realize her ambitions in theater, film, and literature, laying out the long path to the publication of her novels.

At once philosophical, intimate, and urgent, Black and Female is a powerful testimony of the pervasive and long-lasting effects of racism and patriarchy that provides an ultimately hopeful vision for change. Black feminists are "the status quo's worst nightmare." Dangarembga writes, "our conviction is deep, bolstered by a vivid imagination that reminds us that other realities are possible beyond the one that obtains."

About Tsitsi Dangarembga

Tsitsi Dangarembga is the author of This Mournable Body, short-listed for the Booker Prize, and two previous novels including Nervous Conditions, winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize. She is also a filmmaker, playwright, and the director and founder of the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa Trust. She lives in Harare, Zimbabwe.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Esme on March 04, 2023

Wowz despite making me feel like I had a jacket potato instead of a brain this was excellent to read. Every sentence slapped. Granted, I had to re-read most sentences until I understood them but when I did!!!! 🔥🔥FYYREE. When my girl said “white people do not know what makes them white because the wo......more

Goodreads review by Rebecca on September 19, 2022

Radical and brilliant. A must read text......more

Goodreads review by Corrie on December 26, 2022

Writing while black and female. Black female and the superwoman black feminist. Decolonisation as revolutionary imagining. Tsitsi Dangarembga boldly writes the unfortunate social, political and economic straits that the black African woman faced in the colonial era, linking it with the repressive stru......more

Goodreads review by Tondi on September 20, 2024

Tsitsi Dangarembga tackles empire and colonialism, with its seemingly endless tentacles in a direct and compassionate collection of essays. As a Zimbabwean woman, this book structured the historical, political, and social forces which create our Black and Female personhood. ‘I am an existential refug......more

Goodreads review by anna on October 06, 2024

a brilliant collection of essays on womanhood, feminism, racism, decolonisation, which is to say intersectionality. her metaphor of empire being a guillotine and then ending the essay with "Through words I raise the blade of the guillotine, reach for the dismembered parts, and rejoin them to the res......more