Precarity, poverty porn and vernacular cosmopolitanism in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Meg Vandermerwe’s Zebra Crossing

ABSTRACT

This article analyses precarity as variously represented in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013) and Meg Vandermerwe’s Zebra Crossing (2013). We Need New Names was characterized as formulaic “poverty porn”, a term that could equally be applied to Zebra Crossing. Challenging the use of this problematic term to censure novels for exposing dire conditions in African countries, the article uses the technique of reparative reading, and applies the insights of Helen Hester to “poverty porn”, to show that the effects of compassion and prurience aroused by such texts can stimulate readers’ impulse for meaningful reflection leading to changed attitudes. It then refutes what Brian Bwesigye calls the “identity wars” between Afropolitans based overseas and Africans living in and writing about the African continent, and highlights the vernacular cosmopolitanism of both novels, which depict culturally specific precarity, but make appeals to the active sympathies of readers in both global south and global north.

KEYWORDS:

• Precarity
• poverty porn
• prurience
• compassion
• identity wars
• vernacular cosmopolitanism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work is based on research supported in part by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa [grant number: CSRP170511230605]. The views expressed are to be ascribed to the author, not the NRF.

Notes on contributors

Cheryl Stobie

Cheryl Stobie is a professor of English studies on the Pietermaritzburg campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. As one of the editors of the journal Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa she has edited a number of special issues. Her current research interests include precarity, social justice, the role of cultural texts in effecting social change, and testing theory from the global north against artefacts produced in or about the global south.