Nationalist historiography, Nation-state making and Secondary School History: Curriculum Policy in Zimbabwe 1980-2010

This paper studies the curriculum policy trajectories that have characterized the teaching of secondary school History as a subject that is historically enmeshed in the politics of nation-state making in post-independence Zimbabwe. Through content analysis, the paper examines the ways in which the post-independence History syllabi, namely 2166 and 2167, have drawn from recent historiographies to frame both the aims and content of school History. The argument developed is that both syllabi have been deployed to serve the envisaged nation-state project; with Syllabus 2166 associated with the socialist nation-state project of the 1980s and 2167 with patriotic history since 2000. The paper concludes that such (mis)uses of school are not unique to Zimbabwe, but represent the political instrumentalization of school History that has become prevalent throughout the world.

Between Memory and History : The Nineteenth Century in Jewelle Gomez’s Vampire Novel The Gilda Stories and the TV Series True Blood

This article examines two American vampire narratives that depict the perspective and memories of a main character who is turned into a vampire in the US in the nineteenth century: Jewelle Gomez’s novel The Gilda Stories (1991), and the first season of Alan Ball’s popular TV series True Blood (2008). In both narratives, the relationship between the past and the present, embodied by the main vampire character, is of utmost importance, but the two narratives use vampire conventions as well as representations of and references to the nineteenth century in different ways that comment on, revise, or reinscribe generic and socio-historical assumptions about race, gender, class, and sexuality.