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The unsettled settler: personal and discursive tragedy in Alexandra Fuller's memoirs
Alexandra Fuller's memoirs detail the lives of white settlers in Southern Africa (specifically Zimbabwe) from white-rule to post-independence. Her memoirs illustrate how the settler colonial dream of the promised land in Africa would ultimately fail to be fully realised and maintainable. Yet, throug...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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Department of English Language and Literature
2023
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| _version_ | 1867613231558688768 |
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| access_status_str | Open Access |
| author | Scott, Skye |
| author2 | Boswell, Barbara |
| author_browse | Boswell, Barbara Scott, Skye |
| author_facet | Boswell, Barbara Scott, Skye |
| author_sort | Scott, Skye |
| collection | Thesis |
| description | Alexandra Fuller's memoirs detail the lives of white settlers in Southern Africa (specifically Zimbabwe) from white-rule to post-independence. Her memoirs illustrate how the settler colonial dream of the promised land in Africa would ultimately fail to be fully realised and maintainable. Yet, through the portrayal of unexamined colonial discourse, Fuller continues to perpetuate a constructed notion of Africa. The publication of her first memoir, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, coincided with international media coverage of President Robert Mugabe's contested land redistribution programme and told a similar story of the loss of their family farm. Written from her home in Wyoming in the United States, Fuller's work forms part of a white expatriate culture that writes home to Africa from a different continent. Previous works have failed to address the theme of settler colonialism in literature specifically pertaining to the field of Southern African literature. This dissertation makes use of a postcolonial framework to examine Alexandra Fuller's work; Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier and Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness. Fuller's memoirs are used to explore the function of innocence, nostalgia and memory in postcolonial white writing, the construction of whiteness and masculinity in Africa and the tragedy of discourse that is still pervasive in the portrayal of colonial notions of Africa as a playground for disaffected Westerners. Fuller's writing forms part of a Zimbabwean post-independence body of work that absolves whiteness of complicity and a history of colonial violence. Fuller's memoirs ultimately do not settle on a definitive point about Zimbabwe and its history of colonial dispossession or herself and settler colonial family. |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/37846 |
| institution | University of Cape Town (South Africa) |
| language | eng |
| last_indexed | 2026-06-10T12:32:51.499Z |
| license_str | Not specified — see source repository |
| provenance_str_mv | Harvested via OAI-PMH from UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| publishDate | 2023 |
| publishDateRange | 2023 |
| publishDateSort | 2023 |
| publisher | Department of English Language and Literature |
| publisherStr | Department of English Language and Literature |
| record_format | dspace |
| source_str | UCTD — University of Cape Town Open Access Repository |
| spelling | oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/37846 The unsettled settler: personal and discursive tragedy in Alexandra Fuller's memoirs Scott, Skye Boswell, Barbara Haarhoff, Mandisa English Language Alexandra Fuller's memoirs detail the lives of white settlers in Southern Africa (specifically Zimbabwe) from white-rule to post-independence. Her memoirs illustrate how the settler colonial dream of the promised land in Africa would ultimately fail to be fully realised and maintainable. Yet, through the portrayal of unexamined colonial discourse, Fuller continues to perpetuate a constructed notion of Africa. The publication of her first memoir, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, coincided with international media coverage of President Robert Mugabe's contested land redistribution programme and told a similar story of the loss of their family farm. Written from her home in Wyoming in the United States, Fuller's work forms part of a white expatriate culture that writes home to Africa from a different continent. Previous works have failed to address the theme of settler colonialism in literature specifically pertaining to the field of Southern African literature. This dissertation makes use of a postcolonial framework to examine Alexandra Fuller's work; Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood, Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier and Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness. Fuller's memoirs are used to explore the function of innocence, nostalgia and memory in postcolonial white writing, the construction of whiteness and masculinity in Africa and the tragedy of discourse that is still pervasive in the portrayal of colonial notions of Africa as a playground for disaffected Westerners. Fuller's writing forms part of a Zimbabwean post-independence body of work that absolves whiteness of complicity and a history of colonial violence. Fuller's memoirs ultimately do not settle on a definitive point about Zimbabwe and its history of colonial dispossession or herself and settler colonial family. 2023-04-28T09:25:46Z 2023-04-28T09:25:46Z 2022 2023-04-28T09:23:56Z Master Thesis Masters MA http://hdl.handle.net/11427/37846 eng application/pdf Department of English Language and Literature Faculty of Humanities |
| spellingShingle | English Language Scott, Skye The unsettled settler: personal and discursive tragedy in Alexandra Fuller's memoirs |
| thesis_degree_str | Master's |
| title | The unsettled settler: personal and discursive tragedy in Alexandra Fuller's memoirs |
| title_full | The unsettled settler: personal and discursive tragedy in Alexandra Fuller's memoirs |
| title_fullStr | The unsettled settler: personal and discursive tragedy in Alexandra Fuller's memoirs |
| title_full_unstemmed | The unsettled settler: personal and discursive tragedy in Alexandra Fuller's memoirs |
| title_short | The unsettled settler: personal and discursive tragedy in Alexandra Fuller's memoirs |
| title_sort | unsettled settler personal and discursive tragedy in alexandra fuller s memoirs |
| topic | English Language |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/11427/37846 |
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