Popular Expressions of Pan-Africanism and Southern African Nationalism(s): Convergences, Divergences, and Reconciliations in South Africa and Zimbabwe is a dissertation study that traces the transformations, reveals the tensions, and critically analyzes diverging and converging trajectories of different manifestations of African nationalism, including ethnic nationalism, state nationalism, and Pan-Africanism using contemporary South Africa and Zimbabwe as sites of analyses. Focusing on the metropolitan provinces of Gauteng and Harare respectively, I use the study to interrogate how popular expressions of African nationalism have emerged and evolved in the neighboring nations during their anti-colonial/anti-apartheid struggles throughout the 20th century, and how they exist today. Presenting a thesis that I call nationalisms from below, the research study reveals how these manifestations of nationalism are imagined, practiced, and represented by the initiatives and actions of different members of the civil society including artists, activists, laborers, and migrants in the two countries' contemporary politics and society. My findings lead to a nuanced determination of the factors that influence the intersections, divergences, and convergences of what I refer to in the study as Africa's tripartite nationalist expressions and identities-ethnicism, African Nationalism, and Pan-Africanism. Critically, the study also aims to disrupt traditional elitist conceptualizations of these phenomena by employing a critical bottom-up approach that gives agency to oft-marginalized participants in the manifestation of nationalism in its various incarnations: the general populace along with its multiple identities and contradictions.The study interrogates the interrelations among ethnic nationalism, state and national nationalism, and Pan-Africanism, using South Africa and Zimbabwe as case studies that both represent the larger postcolonial region, yet also bear distinct dynamics birthed out of the histories of settler colonialism and the late advent of majority rule. In so doing, I demonstrate the relevance and manifestations of nationalism and Pan-Africanism in the everyday lives of Black South Africans and Zimbabweans. While using the two countries as a window into the general condition of postcolonial Africa, the research also interrogates how their distinct history of settler colonialisms, racialism, and delayed transitions to democracy have shaped the ways in which the populace in the two countries engage with Pan-Africanism and African nationalism.
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