From Africa to America: Precarious Belongings in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names

Toward postmigrant realities in Leila Aboulela’s Elsewhere, Home

“…The contemporary moment has seen a veritable outpouring of migration narratives in the form of short stories, novels, poetry, and nonfiction, particularly by writers connected with the African continent. Many of these writers, including Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Taiye Selasi, Brian Chikwava, Chika Unigwe and NoViolet Bulawayo, have been extensively studied from perspectives of cosmopolitanism and Afropolitanism (Toivanen, 2018;Phiri, 2017;Knudsen and Rahbek, 2017), identity and alterity (Berning, 2015;Okolocha, 2016;De Mul, 2014), and dislocation and exploitation (Moji, 2014;Cobo-Piñero, 2018;Ligaga, 2019). However, despite this abundance of perspectives on writers and their works which are often labelled migrant, there have also been urgent calls for new ways of theorizing migration (Fasselt, 2019;Kraler, 2011;Edmunds, 2006).…”