Narrating global asymmetries of power: Children’s play/games and photography in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names

ABSTRACT

Focusing on NoViolet Bulawayo’s deployment of children’s play/games and photography, this article reads We Need New Names (2013) as a text that represents African encounters and contacts with global modernity. It poses the children’s games and mobility as interpretive schemas that can be used to analyse intimate experiences of foreign spaces/powers in ways that centre childhood as an important site for grappling with larger social-political issues, at a time when national borders are becoming porous and permeable to globalizing formations. In addition, the article examines photography as an archive that mobilizes and disseminates power-laden narratives in hierarchical regimes of representation, and whose epistemic violence can be traced to historical Africa–west encounters. While analysing the symbolic performances of these non-hegemonic characters and their experiencing of north–south and south–south encounters, this article also homes in on Bulawayo’s representation of how they engender forms of agency and resistance that trouble hegemonic representational and epistemic regimes.

KEYWORDS:

• NoViolet Bulawayo
• photography
• global modernity
• archive
• elsewheres
• poverty porn

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Felix Ndaka

Felix Ndaka is a postdoctoral fellow at the African Centre for the Study of the United States, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. He has a PhD in African literature from the same university. His current research interests revolve around the vexed questions of home and belonging; inter- and intra-racial relations among the African diasporas; the intersections of race, gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and nation in contemporary African migrations and diasporas; African encounters with global modernity; and the cultural and intellectual productions within the context of these encounters.