Race, Class, Gender, and Language in Bulawayo’s We Need New Names

Modern literary criticism adopted new analytical directions through the arrival of feminist discourse because it allows researchers to investigate gender structures and power dynamics in their scholarly works. Literary criticism analyzes female characters together with composition patterns influenced by gender-based power differences in literary works. The analysis assesses feminist theory by examining literary works produced by Virginia Woolf in her book Mrs. Dalloway and Toni Morrison in Beloved and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie through Americanah. Through the combination of liberal feminism with radical feminism and an intersectionality approach both social analysis and text evaluation produce advanced methods. Mrs. In Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf presents Clarissa Dalloway as a narrative symbol who objects to Victorian expectations for feminine conduct. The present age demands that people maintain rights to share their thoughts since liberal feminism acknowledges the constrained range of female selections. As Lisa Rappaport explains through radical feminist analysis patriarchy functions as a universal system that stops women from gaining freedom and undermines their attempts to establish independence. By analyzing Beloved through intersectional feminist theory this paper demonstrates how racial components establish parallel relations with gender elements and historical context. In her works Morrison depicts African-American women who metaphorically combat dual oppressions based on gender and race. Onset of Sethe's story allows scholars to understand central themes in Beloved while uncovering various ways black women suffered at the hands of slavery. The terminal assessment material involves Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie which uses immigration and globalization perspectives to study gender identity. The process of her cultural transition between Nigeria and America prompts Ifemelu to experience evaluations both from liberal feminist and radical feminist perspectives. Through her use of enduring feminist concepts about physical standards and racial elements and cultural differences Adichie demonstrates why literary research needs feminist study to remain essential today. Analytical demonstrations in the study establish how feminist literary analysis allows researchers to identify gender structures and power mechanisms by using various analytical tools for literary interpretation. The literary study of the future stands on fundamental feminist discourse principles to function properly since feminist theory acts as both an analysis tool for gender terms in literature and a research method development tool across diverse historical and cultural contexts. Literary scholars identifying diverse textual presentations that represent multiculturalism can do so by referring to feminist theory in analyzing past scholarly findings.Modern literary scholarship draws its energy from feminist theory as its application produces broad intellectual discussions about feminist theory.

Purpose This chapter examines the current incarnation of African literature as written by a younger generation, less concerned with writing back to the colonial empire, and more with examining issues of migration and the consequences of living in diaspora. It contrasts the concerns and experiences of the older generation of African writers such as Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiongo with the current generation, especially Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Mukoma wa Ngugi. Design/methodology/approach It engages in literary and cultural analyses of selected texts, revealing how a range of current issues, such as women’s rights, are discussed therein. Findings A new generation of African writers, many having already been through the migratory experience before writing, are engaging a range of issues that are no longer identical to those concerning writers of the immediate colonial experience. Issues of sexuality, migration and post-independence challenges become prominently articulated. Originality/value Women’s rights were raised by an earlier generation of African women writers and are seen now not so much as radical positions but as assessments of how men and women are socialised. The ways in which people are encouraged or discouraged from articulating full equality as part of the larger critique of post-independence African states is a focus.

This paper examines the pervasive theme of cynicism in the narratives of Nigerian migrants as represented in contemporary Nigerian novels. Through an analysis of works by writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sefi Atta, Chika Unigwe and Helon Habila, the study identifies cynicism as a recurring lens used to portray the migrant experience. These authors often present migration as a fruitless endeavour, marked by disillusionment, failure and despair. Cynicism manifests in their depiction of migrants’ struggle with unemployment, alienation, identity loss and fractured relationships. The narratives suggest that migrants face challenges both in their home countries and in the Diaspora, ultimately reinforcing a sense of futility. Using psychoanalytic theory, the paper argues that this cynicism reflects the authors’ own frustrations and ambivalence about their diasporic experiences, which they project onto their characters. Furthermore, the study critiques the reductive representation of migrants as perpetual failures, questioning why contemporary Nigerian novelists neglect success stories of the diaspora. The paper calls for a broader critique of this narrative approach to understand its implication and explore alternative representations of the migrant experience. Keywords: Cynicism, Diaspora, Contemporary, Migrants, Nigerian

Reviewed by: Daughter in Exile by Bisi Adjapon Adele Newson-Horst BISI ADJAPON Daughter in Exile New York. HarperVia. 2023. 400 pages. AN INTERESTING TREND has emerged in the decade during which African and diaspora women feature the experience of migration—outside of Africa. NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names (2013), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah (2013), Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing (2016), and Imbolo Mbue's Behold the Dreamers (2016) are among the many notable works. The various waves of African movement began with the transatlantic slave trade, the experiences of which are captured in the resistance narrative. Since that time, women have produced an impressive body of work that speaks to their conditions in the diaspora and often reveals a longing for the homeland. Daughters in Exile is an admirable addition to this body of works. The novel narrates the story of Olivia Akura Lola Oduro as she leaves Ghana to [End Page 65] work as a professional in Senegal, falls in love with a Haitian American soldier, has a son, marries a white American, has a daughter, achieves American citizenship, and ultimately returns home to Ghana. In some ways, it reads as a cautionary tale of what happens when the individual bucks tradition. But it is so much more. The novel features the clash between the traditional way of being with a modern way of being for women. The results reveal that it takes a bit of both to survive in the world of America. Interestingly, the novel begins on the day that the principal character finds out her US immigration status. Interspersed throughout the novel are letters between mother (representing Ghanaian tradition) and daughter. By turns the novel reveals how Olivia negotiates her life, first in Senegal and then in North America. And, as in the resistance narratives of the nineteenth century, naming signals a choice in the way of being in the world. Olivia hates the Western name her mother gives her and opts to call herself Lola (a Nigerian name) when she attends university. Presented in three parts, with chapters largely named for Akan adages/sayings, Lola moves from a privileged existence in Senegal, to utter poverty in America, to ultimate triumph. Like many such novels, this one addresses the relationship between Africans and African Americans, and to Adjapon's credit, she admits that "I was ignorant about the long-term effects of slavery. … I had been so absorbed with my need for survival I hadn't thought enough about my place or role as a Black person." It also features the immigrant as easy target of employer exploitation. Indeed, contrary to the myth of the gold-lined streets of American, the immigration experience for Africans is often lined with coal. The myth, Lola learns, is the result of the exportation of so-called American excellence. This novel is definitely worth reading. Adele Newson-Horst Morgan State University Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Critiques of Afropolitanism that dismiss the concept because of its links to consumerism and commodification assume an unchallenging compliance of those considered as Afropolitans with dominant ideologies of consumption and the rule of capital. Considering Taiye Selasi's article ‘Bye-Bye Babar', this seems plausible, but it is also a reductive interpretation that effaces the transformative potential of Afropolitanism. The literary works and online presence in public discourses of writers labelled Afropolitan show that they challenge and revise the present world order in the way that Walter Mignolo and other theorists of decoloniality envisage in their concept of ‘critical cosmopolitanism’. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Teju Cole, for example, implement Afropolitanism as a critical assessment of global culture that defies a reduction of the concept simply to its commercial dimension. In their own ways, Adichie and Cole explore the affordances and the limitations of the internet, mobility and globalization.

This contribution reports on a qualitative study conducted with 14 young Chinese children enrolled in French immersion in Canada, to explore their multilingual practices, and their simultaneous acquisition of three writing systems. Drawings and in-depth interviews constituted creative and age appropriate narratives to understand children's experience of migration and multilingualism. We explored in particular how multilingual children creatively appropriate Chinese script, English and French for three purposes: (a) to gain voice and expertise; (b) to mediate their experience of migration and mobility; and (c) to reconstruct knowledge and negotiate new and multiple identities in their various socio-cultural settings, including both French and Chinese schools, families, local communities and the larger Anglophone society in Vancouver.

This article analyzes NoViolet Bulawayo’s critically acclaimed debut novel We Need New Names (2013), bringing to the fore the legacies of colonialism and the subsequent diaspora to the West. Like the work of other contemporary Afrodiasporic writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Taiye Selasi and Imbolo Mbue, Bulawayo’s narrative recreates the problematic space of dislocated, transnational migrants who are attached to a postcolonial and a metropolitan “home,” and denied fundamental rights in both. Unstable belongings are part of the new subjectivities forged in postcolonial contexts, where invisibility is also a social, political and economic sign of precarity. In Bulawayo’s novel, social conflicts, abusive governments, linguistic imposition, displacement and migration are revealed through a group of African children, first in a Zimbabwean shantytown and then in the United States. This study contextualizes the diasporic dilemmas of belonging and identity formation, while at the same time exploring the possibilities of political agency within contemporary Afrodiasporic literature. Keywords: precarious belongings; NoViolet Bulawayo; Afrodiasporic literature; postcoloniality; invisibility

Introduction Migration is at the core of today’s professional sport. In football, since 2020, the rate of migrant players has increased by 20% (Poli et al., 2024). Transnational mobility has become a highly valuable commodity making transnational football career an inescapable pathway to either professional level or world-class level. Therefore, understanding cross-borders sports mobility processes is crucial for both players and stakeholders to effectively prepare and negotiate cultural transitions. Transnational career and pathway research in sport psychology is recent, limited, and suggests that maintaining a career as a migratory athlete remains challenging (Book et al., 2021; Ryba & et al., 2016; Storm et al., 2022). By identifying challenges faced, and psychological process involved, those researches highlight at what extent culture frames athletes’ sport and non-sport life experiences. However, no studies focused on neither the first cultural transition nor African athletes. From analysis of some previous studies, it seems that the experience of the first cultural transition shapes the willingness to initiate and the experience of the following migrations (Book et al., 2021; Ryba et al., 2016). On the other hand, African countries are deeply distinct from the most other countries worldwide regarding relevant features shaping people’s life experience: social security, gross domestic product, facilities, governance, and race. Furthermore, African countries are among those displaying the highest growth of expatriate footballers (Poli et al., 2024). Additionally, most of athletic migrations from Africa correspond to forced migration (United Nations Humans Rights Council, 2022), with the difference that it is triggered by a contract. Thus, what characterize the experience of the first cultural transition of African footballers? This study aimed to explore the athletic transnational career of Cameroonian footballers to characterize their experience of the first cultural transition. Methods This study is grounded within Critical Realism philosophy. It is useful to engage causal analysis and explanation of social problems and suggest practical recommendations for social change (Fletcher, 2017). Fourteen Cameroonian former footballers were purposively sampled following three criteria: having spent at least the formative years in Cameroon, did the first cultural transition for athletic career development, and having played professionally for a football club abroad at least one season. The participants’ position in the pitch included all the main positions acknowledged in football (goalkeeper, defender, midfielder, and striker), and the country of their first cultural transition included the four continents (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Germany, France, Indonesia, Greece, Côte d’Ivoire, Paraguay, Italy, Switzerland, and Turkey). The semi-structured interviews based on life story and timeline interviews approaches were conducted, focusing on the participants’ experience of athletic transnational mobilities. This included a series of two interview sessions which lasted between 25 and 121 minutes. A total of 26 interviews were audio recorded, transcribed, and reflexively thematically analyzed (Braun & Clarke, 2021). The study applied the four rigorous criteria to ensure qualitative study trustworthiness: credibility, dependability, confirmability, and transferability (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Results Nine themes (with their sub-themes) and their relationship were identified: Mental Health Issues (MHI), Context of athletic migration and seven challenges related to: Club and Contract, Team, Pitch, Way of life, Geography, Home country, and High Level Athlete status. MHI emerged as output of the context and challenges. MHI were characterized by players’ psychological distress and inability to understand that condition, and inability of the club leading team to understand what they were going through. The context of athletic migration was characterized by unplanned transition, adolescence, club’s facilities, and perception of moving abroad as having succeed their football career and life (satisfaction of achieving the dream). Challenges characterized tough situations players went through like contract disruption (club and team), broken In-group (team), injury (pitch), new mentality (way of life), winter (geography), long-distance relationship (home country), and experience of professionalism (High Level Athlete status). Discussion/Conclusion This research is the first to study the first cultural transition of athletes and to use a sample of athletes from Africa. The results depict main features characterizing the experience of the first athletic migration of young talented Cameroonian footballers. Applying critical realism philosophy, MHI was identified as the effect of the migration context and challenges faced. Those findings are consistent with the holistic developmental and ecological perspectives to talent development (Wylleman & Rosier, 2016), Intersectionality (Book et al., 2021), cultural sport psychology (Schinke & Hanrahan, 2009), and challenges underscored in previous transnational athletic career studies (Book et al., 2021; Ryba et al., 2016; Storm et al., 2022). Most importantly, this study highlights new result patterns enriching literature and providing critical information for African athletes and sport stakeholders: MHI (explicitly underscored), context of athletic migration, challenges related to winter, new mentality, broken In-group, etc. As successful talented footballers, they anticipated migration with professional contract as the guarantee of happiness. Actually, those young talented footballers navigated through the satisfaction of achieving professional level and distress. They struggled with psychological distress by shouldering the acculturation load and some professional football’s drifts in an environment which was not supportive enough, because it does not understand them. They could not seek for help because the lack means to understand their condition. Thus, this study is directly related to two Sustainable Development Goals (the third and eighth) by addressing mental health and decent work (United Nations Humans Rights Council, 2022). The results suggest several practical implications: informed football stakeholders’ action, strengthen coaches’ training, adjust sport psychologists’ intervention, and build solid preparatory foundation for next transnational African footballers. References Book, R. T., Jr., Henriksen, K., & Stambulova, N. (2021). Oatmeal is better than no meal: The career pathways of African American male professional athletes from underserved communities in the United States. International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 19(4), 504–523. https://doi.org/10.1080/1612197X.2020.1735258 Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2021). One size fits all? What counts as quality practice in (reflexive) thematic analysis? Qualitative Research in Psychology, 18(3), 328–352. https://doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2020.1769238 Fletcher, A. J. (2017). Applying critical realism in qualitative research: Methodology meets method. International Journal of Social Research Methodology: Theory & Practice, 20(2), 181–194. https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2016.1144401 Lincoln, Y., & Guba, E. G. (1985). Naturalistic inquiry. Sage. Poli, R., Ravenel, L., & Besson, R. (2024, May). Origins and destinations of football expatriates (2020–2024). CIES Football Observatory [Monthly Report n°95]. https://football-observatory.com/MonthlyReport95 Ryba, T. V., Stambulova, N. B., & Ronkainen, N. J. (2016). The work of cultural transition: An emerging model. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, Article 427. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00427 Schinke, R. J., & Hanrahan, S. J. (Eds.). (2009). Cultural sport psychology. Human Kinetics. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781492595366 Storm, L. K., Book, R. T., Jr., Hoyer, S. S., Henriksen, K., Küttel, A., & Larsen, C. H. (2022). Every boy’s dream: A mixed method study of young professional Danish football players’ transnational migration. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 59, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2021.102125 United Nations Human Rights Council. (2022). Mid-year trends 2022. https://www.unhcr.org/mid-year-trends Wylleman, P., & Rosier, N. (2016). Holistic perspective on the development of elite athletes. In M. Raab, P. Wylleman, R. Seiler, A.-M. Elbe, & A. Hatzigeorgiadis (Eds.), Sport and exercise psychology research: From theory to practice (pp. 270–282). Elsevier Inc.

Intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, refers to the multiple levels of discrimination which take place due to the intersection of various social identities, i.e. race, gender, religion, age, class, …etc. One of the essential aspects of intersectionality theory is intersectional feminism, which calls for gender equality and aims at ending discrimination against women with various intersecting identities. The problems of women of color in America and the misogyny they have suffered from throughout history have become the subject of many literary works. Among these problems is discrimination and multiple oppression against black women, especially immigrants. This paper analyzes three short stories by the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from her collection of short stories <i>The Thing Around Your Neck</i> (2009): “The Things Around Your Neck,” “The American Embassy,” and “On Monday of Last Week.” The paper uses intersectionality as the main theoretical framework of the paper. In the light of the four domains of inequality (structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal), the paper demonstrates that, although the three protagonists have distinct personal experiences, their narratives reveal shared struggles rooted in their position as women of color within the American society.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical comparative analysis of the disgust discourse in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013) and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013) so as to better understand the current politics of Afrodiasporic subjectivation. Built primarily on Sara Ahmed’s reflections on the emotional economies of disgust developed in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), the discussion explores the relationship between space, emotions and subjectivity from the perspective of the “emotional turn” which is still under development within Postcolonial and Gender Urban Studies. This approach has enabled the understanding of the geographies of disgust in the two selected novels as an illustration of the exclusion process of racialisation in present urban spaces. Moreover, the interpretation of their protagonists as personifications of Isabel Carrera Suárez’s “post-colonial and post-diasporic pedestrian” (2015) has showed how an abject condition in non-western cities is primarily the result of the diverse forms of violence resulting from a failed process of decolonisation, while this corresponds to an ambivalent social positionality in the hegemonic metropolis. Social abjection has been thus revealed as a fundamental negotiation status in thesubjectivation process of contemporary Afrodiasporians.

Reviewed by: Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery by Yogita Goyal, and: Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination ed. by Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal Gwen Bergner Yogita Goyal. Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery. New York: New York UP, 2019. 271 pp. $30.00. Eds. Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal. Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2020. 248 pp. $30.00. If Stephen Best wrote "the epitaph of the Beloved moment" to free Black identity from a melancholic relation to slavery and disrupt the assumed continuity between slavery's past and racial inequalities today, then these two books examine how the next generation makes use of slavery's history. Both acknowledge the neo-slave narrative, emblematized by Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), reigned for several decades as the "paradigmatic mode for thinking about African American identity and history" (Goyal 1), but hail new ways of reckoning with slavery's meaning today. Goyal sticks with the slave narrative form, but asks what happens when it goes global. Current human rights abuses, from trafficking to undocumented immigration, from conscription of child soldiers to forced marriage, from debt bondage to domestic servitude, now use the neo-slave narrative as an analogic template. Goyal asks how this analogy functions, "what histories does it summon, what hidden relations between power and knowledge make visible?" (10). Ashe and Saal recognize its globalization, but declare a radical break with the neo-slave narrative paradigm by post-Black artists in the United States. Branching beyond the literary, the essays explore how Black cultural productions since 1987 "refigure canonical, popular, and sacrosanct narratives, motifs, memes, and iconographies" to stage new encounters with slavery (Ashe and Saal 17). Together, these books explore how new aesthetic forms "counter[] the hegemony of any single genealogy of blackness" (Goyal 15). Arguing the slave narrative is now a "world literary genre" (4-5), Goyal examines this global proliferation through a variety of literary contexts, from narratives of conscripted African child soldiers to the new African diaspora in the United States. With chapters organized by genre, including the sentimental, the gothic, satire, surrogation, and revisionism, she asks how the analogy between transatlantic slavery and contemporary phenomena of migration, trauma, and global racial formations functions. In two chapters on narratives of African child soldiers, Goyal is critical of sentimental narratives, such as a memoir by Francis Bok and a novel by Dave Eggers that let Western readers imagine themselves as global citizens "via their humanitarian empathy for the African victim of atrocity" (13), but in the process dehistoricize and universalize the particular causes of the traumas they narrate. By contrast, Goyal appreciates the "gothic" narratives by Chris Abani and Ahmadou Lourouma that "refus[e] closure or redemption" (13). These versions depart from the classic slave narrative's sympathetic appeal by uncovering silenced histories and "challeng[ing] the absolute innocence demanded by human rights advocates" (13). Like the gothic narratives, Goyal appreciates recent African American post-Black satires of slavery by Mat Johnson, Paul Beatty, and Colson Whitehead that use "absurd juxtapositions, surreal analogies, and farcical adventures" (14) to expose the contradiction inherent in the previous generation's neo-slave narratives, which claimed that slavery persists while narrating escape from its regime. Succeeding [End Page 341] chapters include an exploration of texts Goyal sees as challenging Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s tradition-founding premise that literacy delivered Black freedom by allowing the objectified slave to write him or herself into Enlightenment subjectivity. Rather than accepting the Western equation of literacy with subjectivity, Toni Morrison, Caryl Phillips, Robin Coste Lewis, and M. NourbeSe Philip "refigure the relations among liberal Enlightenment ideas of humanity, the black presence in the West, and the expansion of the African American literary tradition to a more global one across time and space" (145) by "ventriloquizing" the words, language, and texts of the Western tradition to unsettle their racial epistemologies. The final chapter considers how writers of "the new African Diaspora," such as Chris Abani, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo, Teju Cole, and Dinaw Mengetsu provide narratives of migration, postcolonial Africa, and the vicissitudes of globalization. These texts indicate that the Black Atlantic diasporic...

NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names is one of a growing number of novels featuring characters from various African countries who migrate to the United States that ranges from Chris Abani’s The Virgin of Flames to Teju Cole’s Open City, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, to name just some of the best-known examples. Drawing on Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s argument about the border as method and on Naoki Sakai’s theorization of homolingual and heterolingual address, this article presents a discussion of We Need New Names as a narrative shaped by the polysemic and heterogeneous figure of the border.

In the field of linguistics, the significance of names has long been recognised, particularly how names given to individuals as well as places indicate or originate from experiences within particular societies. In other words, these names are not just arbitrarily given but carry meanings that can be traced to particular experiences within these societies. However, the exploration of the importance of names within literary texts is known as literary onomastics. It is obvious from the title of her novel that NoViolet Bulawayo realises the importance of names, specifically new ones, for the contemporary experience of Africans. A reading of the novel indicates the author’s concern with the changing African world, in which her examples of changing names reflects the need to modify the way we look at the world, with changes appearing in the form of new ailments (HIV), new forms of colonisation (Chinese industrialisation), and new ways of dealing with the disillusionment in political leadership.

This article scrutinizes the impact of hybridity, cultural identity, and diaspora on the self-identity of African women immigrants and their interactions with others in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013). The overarching argument of this article is that the African women, who immigrate to America, demonstrate self-identity through milieus, such as language, dressing, food, relationships, mannerisms, and physical appearance before and after immigration. The nature of this narrative research is qualitative and employs the post-colonial concepts of Homi Bhabha’s hybridity, Stuart Hall’s cultural identity, and William Safran’s diaspora. The African diasporic authors, namely Adichie and Bulawayo portray the women characters who emigrate from Africa to America. Americanah and We Need New Names have been selected due to the existence of the omnipresent peculiarities, such as immigration of the African women characters to America whose movements oscillate between both spaces and their identity transformation. This article tries to fill the existing gap by illuminating how the African women immigrants’ identity oscillates between both pre-immigration and post-immigration spaces, Africa and America, respectively. When African women characters engage with settings of the American diaspora, their identities change as a result. The article's findings show that there is a notable difference in how African women characters' self-identities are portrayed before and after they immigrated to America. This difference is primarily due to the fact that adoption or rejection of a new self-identity is influenced by a number of factors. It also shows how African diasporic women's altered sense of self influences how they relate to American society as well as the society of their origin.

The conclusion briefly examines divergent trends in the global novel outside the scope of the book, including pop-cultural works by Hari Kunzru and Haruki Murakami, and fictions that probe ongoing forms of neo-colonialism by authors such as Roberto Bolano, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and NoViolet Bulawayo. It concludes by advocating modes of critical practice that reappraise materialist and systemic world-literary analyses to provide a critical reading method that would unpick the limitations, and also the political and aesthetic possibilities, offered by global fictions.