"The Dancing Women Move Forward": Embodied Agency and Black Feminist Solidarity in Tsitsi Dangarembga's This Mournable Body

Abstract: Black feminists, both in Africa and the Diaspora, have always used fiction as a tool for imagining agential subjectivity. Tsitsi Dangarembga is one such author utilizing both fiction and activism to reimagine agency and solidarity for Zimbabwean women. This Mournable Body (2018) centralizes protagonist's Tambudzai Sigauke's embodied reality through the skewed lens of poor mental health whilst also foregrounding the women of her community's struggle for agency. Through Tambu's body, misogynoir and neoliberal individualism are laid bare; yet her complicity with neoliberal regimes reveals an ethical struggle that contemporary feminism grapples with. This article reads This Mournable Body in Black feminist terms, attuned to neoliberal privations (Emejulu and Sobande 2019; Olufemi 2020), transnational solidarities (Mohanty 2003), and contingent agency in African contexts (Diabate 2020). I read for agential moments and tentative solidarities, in particular Nyasha's feminist workshop and the dancing women in the climactic scene (read as a moment of "naked agency" à la Diabate 2020), to show how Dangarembga's novel locates agential subjectivity within embodied acts. This article argues that the novel's embodied moments of Black feminist resistance mobilize a communal, radical Black feminism attuned to uneven global power structures and localized forms of resistance in African contexts.