Writing the Generational Subject is a series on how to refuse and rewind history. The conversations will question what are the mechanisms and techniques in which we can write against and speak to historical erasures and ruptures. Through questioning the foundations and mechanics of writing, the series investigates how it can be used to exert pressure on what has passed and how we connect to those that came before, to recast and enable a more emancipatory future to take shape.

The second conversation with Panashe Chigumadazi will begin by exploring the potential histories surrounding the three Chimurengas (wars in Zimbabwe), from the resistance against colonial violence, patriarchal dominance to the homogenising power of the nation state. The conversation will begin with her latest book, These Bones Will Rise Again(The Inigo Press, 2018), and her current doctoral research, we will speak on the history of religious institutions to mobilise racial violence in Southern Africa and the USA.

Panashe Chigumadzi is an essayist and novelist, born in Zimbabwe and raised in South Africa. Her debut novel Sweet Medicine (Blackbird Books, 2015) won the 2016 K. Sello Duiker Literary Award. Her second book, These Bones Will Rise Again, a reflection on Robert Mugabe’s ouster, was published in June 2018 by the Indigo Press. A columnist for The New York Times, and contributing editor of the Johannesburg Review of Books, her work has featured in titles including The Guardian, Chimurenga, Africa is A Country, Transition, Washington Post and Die Ziet. Chigumadzi was a Ruth First Fellow (2015), and a curator of Soweto’s inaugural Abantu Book Festival (2016). She holds a masters degree in African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand and is currently a doctoral candidate at Harvard University’s Department of African and African American Studies.