Q&A with Dr. Lennon Mhishi



Please join us in welcoming Dr. Lennon Mhishi, our latest faculty member. Dr. Mhishi was kind enough to answer a few questions about his current research and what his students can look forward to learning in his classes. Welcome Dr. Mhishi!

Q: Please share a bit about your current research.

A:  I would characterise my current research as following two main strands. The one comes out of my postgraduate and PhD research, and is an exploration of Zimbabwean negotiation of the elsewhere. What we often reference as migrant identity. Zimbabwe has gone through many decades of socio-economic and political challenges. In light of this, I am trying to suggest, with this work, that Zimbabwe, and Zimbabweans, deserve more complexity in how the history and the present are treated. This is especially against a backdrop of sensational and hegemonic portrayals that often tell a linear story. Of course we recognise even in those places regarded as the homes of a different politics that there isn’t something unique about the socio-economic and political struggles of African peoples that wouldn’t be experienced by anyone else. Yet there are specific historical relations and political moments that, as Stuart Hall would argue, make conjunctural thinking necessary.  I am looking at writing more out of this work, and bringing some of the ideas that have shaped this work to the fore.

Similary, the other strand thinks through the work I have been doing in Oxford with Dan Hicks and our colleagues in Berlin, Capetown, Dschang and Dakar for the Reconnecting Objects project. For this work, I focus on what I call Infrastructures of Containment.

Thinking with and in Zimbabwe as the starting point, I am tracing some of the punitive and extractive orientations that accompany the formation and establishment of the ethnographic and the natural history in the museums. From the interests in mining and the exploitation of the natural environment, to the “collection” of various forms of indigenous material culture, the impetus towards extraction and containment that shapes some of the early museumization functions alongside other punitive and carceral orientations-camps, reserves, prisons, detention centres, and of course, as we see in the present, borders. As someone said in a recent lecture delivered by our colleague Professor Ciraj Rassool in Oxford, it seems some material culture can cross borders and is treated with more value and dignity than the people from whom this material culture comes. They experience the detention that their material culture also experiences in some museums. So this is part of the second strand.

I would say in general I am often trying to think about how being Zimbabwean, being human, in the world, sits in relation to other peoples who have historically experienced and resisted, with all the complications, forms of colonialism and subjugation, who experience it in the present, and how to think together, to forge kinder, loving, generous and less gladiatorial, apocalyptic-seeking planetary relations


Q: What drew you to working in this area?

A: I often tell this anecdote about how I was invited to work on a construction site after I had just arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa. This would be about over 15 years ago now. This person who invited me had heard, at this barbecue, what they call a braai, that I had just arrived from Zimbabwe. So they thought I must need a job, and the offered me what they thought migrant labour for a Zimbabwean would be, without actually even asking who I was, or why I was in South Africa. At this moment, I became convinced that it might be useful to spend time exploring other facets of Zimbabwean life that were not about the ideas of crisis and abjection that were dominant then, and remain dominant now.

So I try to think about Zimbabwe expansively, not refusing the messy parts, but seeing them as part of a larger history and present. I moved countries, and began to reckon in my own work with what this means as I made sense of displocation and displacement. This is also, of course, not unique to me, being an experience shared by many.


Q: What should students know about you & your new courses?

A:  I am interested in creative, participatory and collaborative processes. I hope this comes through the course I am teaching this term on Music and Diaspora. I will be teaching a couple of other courses, on colonialism and heritage, as well as an introductory anthropology one.

As I take to life at UBC, I look forward to learning from the knowledge and lived experiences of the students, and to co-creating gathering and communion spaces where we can think and make together.

Q: Tell us a bit about you outside of teaching – how are you enjoying Vancouver?

A:  I enjoy good food and good music. Of course, a bit cliché and relative, but still true. It’s thrilling that I get to be in a department that also works with a museum, and I am keen to learn about MOA and to be involved in the work they have been doing there. I am excited to discover more about Vancouver, taking walks in the Pacific Spirit Park and spending time in the mountains. I fantasize about cave life! I am also looking forward to knowing my colleagues in anthropology and at UBC better and becoming familiar with their work. Other centres, schools and departments at UBC are of immense interest to me, and I hope to join and be able to collaborate with new colleagues into the future.



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