Tsitsi Dangarembga: Black and Female

Being categorised as black and female does not constrain my

writing. Writing assures me that I am more than merely

blackness and femaleness. Writing assures me I am.

This paradigm shifting essay collection weaves the personal and

political in an illuminating exploration of internationally acclaimed

novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga’s complex relationship with race and

gender. At once philosophical, intimate and urgent,

Dangarembga’s landmark essays address the profound cultural

and political questions that underpin her novels for the first time.

From her experience of life with a foster family in Dover and the

difficulty of finding a publisher as a young Zimbabwean novelist, to

the ways in which colonialism continues to disrupt the lives and

minds of those subjugated by empire, Dangarembga writes to

recentre marginalised voices.

Black and Female offers a powerful vision towards ‘re-membering’

– to use Toni Morrison’s word – those whose identities and

experiences continue to be fractured by the intersections of

history, race and gender.

Tsitsi Dangarembga is the author of three novels: Nervous

Conditions, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize - This

Mournable Body, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and The Book of

Not. She won the PEN Pinter Prize and the German Book Trade

Peace Prize in 2021. Dangarembga is also a filmmaker, playwright

and the director of the Institute of Creative Arts for Progress in

Africa Trust. She lives in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Manchester Central Library, St Peter's Square, Manchester, United Kingdom