Strangers and Necropolitics in NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names.

  1. Suárez-Rodríguez, Ángela 1
  1. 1 Universidad de Oviedo
    info

    Universidad de Oviedo

    Oviedo, España

    ROR https://ror.org/006gksa02

Zeitschrift:
IJES: international journal of English studies

ISSN: 1578-7044,  1989-6131

Datum der Publikation: 2022

Ausgabe: 22

Nummer: 2

Seiten: 17-34

Art: Artikel

DOI: 10.6018/IJES.508761 DIALNET GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openDIGITUM editor

Andere Publikationen in: IJES: international journal of English studies

Ziele für nachhaltige Entwicklung

Zusammenfassung

As a contribution to the recent call for the study of the figure of the stranger in African spaces (Ikhane, 2020), this article examines the first half of NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013). The main reason for this, it is argued, is that the description of the protagonist’s pre-migratory living conditions throughout this part of the narrative reveals a Zimbabwean nation in which the necropolitics resulting from the failures of decolonisation have turned certain segments of the population into strangers in their own land. Their “living dead” status in a situation of social and spatial marginalisation recalls, in particular, the notion of the stranger as the “socially dead” (Rothe & Collins, 2016). However, unlike this and other classical strangers living in a Western urban context, the literary strangers studied here do not represent an othered minority in the community but, rather, exemplify what appears to be a widely shared condition of “strangerness” in some contemporary African cities.

Bibliographische Referenzen

  • Adebanwi, W. & Obadare, E. (Eds.). (2010). Encountering the Nigerian State. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Ahmed, S. (2000). Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
  • Bauman, Z. (1988-1989). Strangers: the social construction of universality and particularity. Telos, 78, 7–42. doi: 10.3817/1288078007
  • Bauman, Z. (1995). Making and unmaking of strangers. Thesis Eleven, 43, 1–16. doi: 10.1177/072551369504300102
  • Bielsa, E. (2016). Cosmopolitanism and Translation: Investigations into the Experience of the Foreign. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
  • Bulawayo, N. (2013). We Need New Names. London: Chatto and Windus.
  • Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York and London: Routledge.
  • Bwesigye, B. (2013, November 22). Is Afropolitanism Africa’s new single story?. Aster(ix) Journal.
  • Carrera-Suárez, I. (2018). Cosmopolitan strangers in the lettered city: reading world writing. In M. B. Hernández, M. Brito & T. Monterrey (Eds.), Broadening Horizons: A Peak Panorama of English Studies in Spain (pp. 13–29). La Laguna: Publishing Service of the University of La Laguna.
  • Cobo-Piñero, M. R. (2019). NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013): mobilities and the Afropolitan picaresque. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 55(4), 472–485. doi: 10.1080/17449855.2018.1540161
  • Di Laura, T. (2020). New Subaltern Identities: A Thematic Analysis of NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names. Doctoral Dissertation, Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy.
  • Durán-Almarza, E. M. (2022). Uncomfortable truths: queer strangers and gendered necropolitics in Akwaeke Emezi’s The death of Vivek Oji. Papers on Languages and Literatures, 58(1), 70–126.
  • Fanon, F. (1963). The Wretched of the Earth. (C. Farrington, Trans.) New York: Grove Press. (Original work published 1961).
  • Fontein, J. (2009). Anticipating the tsunami: rumours, planning and the arbitrary state in Zimbabwe. Source: Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 79(3), 369–398. doi: 10.3366/E0001972009000862
  • Habila, H. (2013, June 20). We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo – Review. The Guardian.
  • Harris, A. (2008). Discourses of dirt and disease in Operation Murambatsvina. In M. T. Vambe (Ed.), The Hidden Dimensions of Operation Murambatsvina (pp. 40–52). Pretoria: Weaver Press.
  • Harris, A. (2020). Afropolitanism and the Novel: De-realizing Africa. London and New York: Routledge.
  • Highfield, J. B. (2020). Postcolonial foodways in contemporary African Literature. In J. M. Coghlan (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food (pp. 228–242). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
  • Horgan, M. (2012). Strangers and strangership. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 33(6), 607–622. doi: 10.1080/07256868.2012.735110
  • Ikhane, P. A. (2020). The stranger, othering, and the epistemology of difference in African space. In E. Imafidon (Ed.), Handbook of African Philosophy of Difference (pp. 413–432). Cham: Springer.
  • Isin, E. F. & Rygiel, K. (2007). Abject spaces: frontiers, zones, camps. In E. Dauphine & C. Masters (Eds.), Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror (pp. 181–203). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Jackson, L., Harris, C., & Valentine, G. (2017). Rethinking concepts of the strange and the stranger. Social & Cultural Geography, 18(1), 1–15. doi: 10.1080/14649365.2016.1247192
  • Kamete, A. Y. (2017). Neither friend nor enemy: planning, ambivalence and the invalidation of urban informality in Zimbabwe. Urban Studies, 57(5), 927–943. doi: 10.1177/0042098018821588
  • Marotta, V. (2017). Theories of the Stranger: Debates on Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Cross-Cultural Encounters. New York: Routledge.
  • Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. (L. Meintjes, Trans.). Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40. doi: 10.1215/08992363-15-1-11
  • Mbembe, A. 2019. Necropolitics. (S. Corcoran, Trans.). Durham and London: Duke UP. (Original work published 2016).
  • Ndjio, B. (2006). Douala: Inventing Life in an African Necropolis. In M. J. Murray & A. Myers (Eds.), Cities in Contemporary Africa (pp. 103–124). New York and Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. (2013). Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization. Dakar: CODESRIA.
  • Ngom, M. A. B. (2020). Migration and its discontents: a postcolonial rendering of NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names. Journal of Critical Studies in Language and Literature, 1(2), 10–19. doi: 10.46809/jcsll.v1i2.6
  • Nyambi, O., Makombe, R., & Motahane, N. (2019). Some kinds of home: home, transnationality and belonging in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names. Forum for Modern Language Studies, 56(1), 78–95. doi: 10.1093/fmls/cqz059
  • Omelsky, M. (2020). African fugitivities. The Black Scholar, 50(1), 56–69. doi: 10.1080/00064246.2020.1690949
  • Overton, J. D. (1990). Social control and social engineering: African reserves in Kenya 1895-1920. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 8, 163–174. doi: 10.1068/d080163
  • Park, R. E. (1974). Cultural conflict and the marginal man. In The Collected Papers of Robert Ezra Park (Vol. 1) (pp. 372–376). New York: Arno Press. (Original work published 1937).
  • Pfalzgraf, M. (2022). Mobility in Contemporary Zimbabwean Literature in English: Crossing Borders, Transcending Boundaries. London and New York: Routledge.
  • Polakow-Suransky, S. (2017). Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy. London: Hurst & Company.
  • Rothe, D. L. & Collins, V. E. (2016). The integrated spectacle: neoliberalism and the socially dead. Social Justice, 43(2), 1–20.
  • Rumford, C. (2013). The Globalization of Strangeness. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Sackeyfio, R. A. (Ed.). (2021). Introduction to West African Women in the Diaspora: Narratives of Other Spaces, Other Selves (pp. 1–12). Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
  • Schutz, A. (1944). The stranger: an essay in social psychology. American Journal of Sociology, 49(6), 499–507.
  • Selasi, T. (2013). Bye-Bye Babar. Callaloo, 36(3), 528–530. (Original work published 2005). doi: 10.1353/cal.2013.0163
  • Shack, W. A. & Skinner, E. P. (Eds.). (1979). Strangers in African Societies. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
  • Simmel, G. (1950). The stranger. In The Sociology of Georg Simmel. (K. Wolff, Trans.) (pp. 402–408). New York: Free Press. (Original work published 1908).
  • Stobie, C. (2020). Precarity, poverty porn and vernacular cosmopolitanism in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Meg Vandermerwe’s Zebra Crossing. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 56(4), 517–531. doi: 10.1080/17449855.2020.1770494
  • Suárez-Rodríguez, Á. (2019). A spatio-emotional analysis of the disgust discourse in contemporary Afrodiasporic fiction: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names. Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, 60, 127–144. doi: 10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.20196295
  • Toivanen, A. L. (2015). Not at home in the world: abject mobilities in Marie NDiaye’s Trois femmes puissantes and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names. Postcolonial Text, 10(1), 1–18.
  • Toivanen, A. L. (2021). Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms in African and Afrodiasporic Literatures. Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi.
  • Wulf, C. (Ed.). (2016). Introduction: Exploring Alterity in a Globalized World. In Exploring Alterity in a Globalized World (pp. 1–33). London: Routledge
  • Yuval-Davis, N. (2011). The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations. London: Sage.
Fuente de los datos: Dialnet