Black Sunlight (1980) is the second major prose work of the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera. Published two years after his highly acclaimed award-winning debut novella The House of Hunger (1978), Black Sunlight courted far less critical attention than its predecessor. An experimental text considered by many early readers to be “unreadable and overdrawn” (Veit-Wild, “Words as Bullets” 116), the novel takes as its main focus the inadequacy of essentialist notions of racial and national identity. Read in the context of a critique of the demands made by radical oppositional politics, Black Sunlight reveals the immanent shortfalls of the “revolutionary” agenda of Zimbabwe’s anti-colonial …
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Citation: Chow, Shun Man Emily, Grant Hamilton. "Black Sunlight". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 March 2012 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=28557, accessed 23 November 2024.]
