Ambivalence of representation

Abstract

Bulawayo's We Need New Names engages with underprivileged postcolonial cosmopolitans in its articulation of a vision that is essentially tragic. The novel compels us to contemplate how Africa has been and can be represented in order to get the attention of a hegemonic Western audience. My discussion also explores the ways in which Bulawayo negotiates some of the unstated ongoing imperatives of what has been called the age of superstar writers and commodification of literature which make an African writer acclaimed in the international arena. Bulawayo's narrative allows the application of the notion that today literary criticism should focus on the structure and dynamics of a specific cultural mode or the cultural production process; in the case of Bulawayo, the migrant writer's representation of Africa in the fraught late capitalist system skewed in favour of the West.