Politics of representation of Zimbabwe and its Native People in Christina Lamb’s House of Stone

Abstract

Derogatory representation of Zimbabwe and its native people is the most dominant and repeated issue in Christina Lamb’s House of Stone. Christina Lamb as the westerner has made the Zimbabwean culture as the critical site of interpretation, analysis, demonstration and intervention. Politically she has fictionalized the African culture with colonial binaries and stereotypes. The images of western power have been utilized by the writer in the mission of canonization of whites and marginalization of blacks. The novel depicts the blacks as uneducated, violent, irrational, superstitious, aggressive, devil, where the positive attributes like rational, kind, educated, independent etc are assigned to whites. In the text, there is the powerful opposition between civilization and savagery. 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. The stereotypes and derogatory images have become the determining factors for representing the native place from the Western perspective. So, this thesis analyses the discursive formations and practices of representations on the orients and tries to dig out the politics behind the derogatory portrayals of native people and their culture by the young generation of Western colonizers.