Exploration of Cultural Resistance in Christina Lamb’s House of Stone
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Department of English
Abstract
The central argument of this research is that lingering colonial mentality in literary creation of western writers and their hegemonic perspective in Zimbabwean multicultural societies that has been explored in Christina Lamb’s fictionalization of Zimbabwe. While insisting that Western civilisation and culture has precariously contaminated the traditional values of Africa or Zimbabwe, the paper contends that Africa had established, well before the advent of colonialism, a pattern of home-grown political systems, governance process and generally acceptable institutional rule-making arrangement, such that there was progression in the pace of civilization of Africa and self-styled tempo of technological development. The paper further submits that the dynamism and significance of Africa on the global continuum tends to support the argument that Africa would have evolved and sustained level of development and civilisation without the retrogressive contact with imperial forces. Christina Lamb as the westerner has made the Zimbabwean culture as the critical site of interpretation, analysis, demonstration and intervention from the western perspective. The construction of non-western culture by assigning violence, terrorism, barbarism, brutality, abnormality, etc is the justifying the superiority over blacks. She has produced so many myths about blacks to create western hegemonic state or cultural imperialism. So, this thesis analyses the discursive formations and practices of calls for reconciliation to the orients and tries to dig out the politics behind the western strategy to diminish the native cultural resistance.