New names, translational subjectivities: (Dis)location and (Re)naming in NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names

NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names – shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Etisalat Prize for Literature in 2013 – is a novel in which the leitmotif of (re)naming associates the trope of migration to the (dis)location and translation of subjectivities. Based on the premise that the movement of subjects from one social context to another is analogous to the translation of text from one language to another, this paper proposes a transitional mode of subjectification. However, I argue against reading Darling’s journey from Zimbabwean shanty dweller to illegal immigrant in America as a linear progression from an original (located) to a translated (dislocated) subjectivity. I further argue that the novel goes beyond the idea of ‘transparent translation’ – a visible layering of a translated subjectivity over a discrete original subjectivity – by privileging their inter-permeability. Semantic and cognitive dissonance are read as textual markers of the psychic (dis)location experienced by displaced subjects. This analysis of Darling’s childhood and adolescent subjectivities leads me to conclude that the novel’s leitmotif of (re)naming as a call for a new hermeneutic code through which translational subjectivities can be understood.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjac202016-11-30hb201

Situating Africa: an alter-geopolitics of knowledge, or Chapungu rises

This journal issue marks the beginning of a new partnership with African Arts as Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa, joins the editorial consortium. As the National Research Foundation Chair in Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa, I will work with collaborators based largely on the African continent to produce one issue of African Arts per year. This first issue has grown out of conversations with artists, curators, and writers based in Uganda, Zimbabwe, and South Africa at a publishing workshop organized by Rhodes University, as well as an institutional collaboration with Makerere University in Uganda. It also includes a dialogue with colleagues in Tanzania, Zambia, Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa, Benin, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, the US, Uganda, and Angola/Portugal. A core goal of our work is to significantly increase the participation of authors based on the African continent as a way of strengthening our discipline with a scholarly approach that takes seriously an alter-geopolitics of knowledge as a decolonial concept (Koopman 2011; Mignolo 2002)