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

Abstract

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.