Lecture: ‘Witnesses and Warriors: Writing Beyond Dissent’

Power structures in Zimbabwe constrain those writing as melanated females. As a result, many who write in spite of such power structures are characterized as writing against them. Writer, filmmaker, and Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow Tsitsi Dangarembga proposes reformulating writing against power as writing for transformation.

Tsitsi Dangarembga is the author of Black and Female, Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not, This Mournable Body (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), and She No Longer Weeps. She was awarded the International PEN Award for Freedom of Expression, co-founded the  Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in Africa (ICAPA) Trust, and founded the International Film Festival for Women in Harare, Zimbabwe.

She currently is a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow, researching the migrations of the people who came to be called the Shona people of Zimbabwe.