"We Need New Names" by NoViolet Bulawayo. Paradigms of Migration: The Flight and the Fall
Abstract
This essay analyses paradigms of migration in We Need New Names (2013) by NoViolet Bulawayo (b. 1981, Zimbabwe), a recent example of new African (or ‘Afropolitan’?) literature. A teenager idealises migration to the United States as a flight to emancipation, if compared to internal flows of forcedly removed people, or unsuccessful flows to South Africa, or even to Britain. As a counterpoint, a downfall follows the flight. The first American experience is a snowfall, then stumbling on the English Language is compared to a fall; physical as well as psychic downfalls send illegal migrants into the invisibility of undesirable jobs and into lying (Mehta 2016) but also into a mental condition. This final outcome of migration has been approached with the tools of ethno-psychiatry (Beneduce 2016-2018) and the recently published short story about migration by Maaza Mengiste, “This is What the Journey Does” (2018).
Bibliografia
Ahmed, Sara. 2007. Multiculturalism and the Promise of Happiness, New Formations, (Winter) 63: 121-137, https://www.mcgill.ca/igsf/files/igsf/Ahmed1/multiculturalism.pd (consulted on 5/06/2018).
Becker, Rayda. 1999. Homesteads and Headrests. H. Judin & I. Vladislavić eds. Architecture, Apartheid and After. Amsterdam: NAi Publishers, 79-83.
Beneduce, Roberto. 2016. Traumatic past and the historical imagination: symptoms of loss, postcolonial suffering, and counter-memories among African migrants. Transcultural Psychiatry, 53, 3: 261-285.
Beneduce, Roberto. 2015. The Moral Economy of Lying: Subjectcraft, Narrative Capital, and Uncertainty in the Politics of Asylum. Medical Anthropology. Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, 34, 6: 551-571.
Beneduce, Roberto, 2008. Breve dizionario di Etnopsichiatria. Roma: Carocci.
Bwesigye, Brian. 2013. Is Afropolitanism Africa’s New Single Story? Reading Helon Habila’s Review of We Need New Names (22 November) http://asterixjournal.com/afropolitanism-africas-new-single-story-reading-helon-habilas-review-need-new-names-brian-bwesigye/ (consulted on 25/05/2018).
Bosh Santana, Stephanie. 2013. Exorcising Afropolitanism: Binyavanga Wainaina explains why ‘I am a Panafricanist, not an Afropolitan’ at ASAKU 2012 (8 February) https://africainwords.com
/2013/02/08/exorcizing-afropolitanism-binyavanga-wainaina-explainswhy-i-am-a-pan-africanist-not-an-afropolitan-at-asauk-2012/ (consulted on 25/05/2018).
Bulawayo, NoViolet. 2013. We Need New Names. London: Chatto & Windus.
Bulawayo, NoViolet. 2014. Eat, Drink, & Be Literary (19 March). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjOGa5BH8Ok (consulted on 25/05/2018).
Concilio, Carmen. 2018. Il frigorifero come antroposcenario. Un portale verso l’Occidente per i migranti. D. Fargione & C. Concilio eds. Antroposcenari. Storie, paesaggi, ecologie. Bologna: Il Mulino, 227-242.
Dabiri, Emma. 2014. Why I’m not an Afropolitan (21 January), https://africasacountry.com/2014/01/why-im-not-an-afropolitan/ (consulted on 25/05/ 2018).
Derrida, Jacques. 2002. The Animal that Therefore I am (trans. by David Wills). Critical Inquiry, 28, 2 (Winter): 369-418, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1344276 (consulted on 25/05/2018).
Habila, Helon. 2013. We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo - A Review. The Guardian, (20 Jun) https://www.theguardian.com
/books/2013/jun/20/need-new-names-bulawayoreview (consulted on 25/05/2018).
Hannerz, Ulf. 1990. Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture. Theory, Culture & Society, 7: 237-251.
Mbembe, Achille. 2007. Afropolitanism. Njami Simon ed. Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, 26-30.
Mehta, Suketu. 2016. The Secret Life of Cities, https://mittalsouthasiainstitute.harvard.edu/event/urbanization-lecture-series/ (consulted on 25/05/2018) [La vita segreta delle città, it. trans. by Norman Gobetti. Torino: Einaudi].
Mengiste, Maaza 2018. This is what the Journey Does. The New York Review of Books (May 17), http://www.nybooks.com/daily/
2018/05/17/this-is-what-the-journey-does/ (consulted on 7/06/2018).
Mofolo, Thomas 1931. Chaka. An Historical Romance, trans. by F. H. Dutton and introduced by Sir H. Newbolt. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nguyen, Viet Tahanh ed. 2018. The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. New York: Abrams Press.
Okwunodu Ogbechie, Sylvester. 2008. Afropolitanism: Africa without Africans, (April 4), http://aachronym.blogspot.it/
2008/04/afropolitanism-more-africa-without.html (consulted on 25/05/2018).
Selasi, Taiye. 2014. Don’t ask where I’m from, ask where I’m a local, https://www.ted.com/talks_taiye_selasi_don_t_ask_where_i_m_from
_ask_where_i_m_a_local_t-3852 (consulted on 25/05/2018).
Selasi, Taiye. 2015. By-By Babar, The Lip, (3 March 2015), http://thelip.robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76 (consulted on 25/05/2018).
Sieber, Roy. 1980. African Furniture and Household Objects. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Schoene, Berthold. 2009. The Cosmopolitan Novel. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Rushdie, Salman. 2008 [1989]. Satanic Verses. New York: Random House.
Tveit, Marta. 2013. The Afropolitan Must Go (28 November 2013), https://africasacountry.com/2013/11/the-afropolitan-must-go/ (consulted on 25/05/2018).