Some Kinds of Home: Home, Transnationality and Belonging in Noviolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names

Abstract

Abstract Over the years, the notion of home has permeated disciplinary, inter- and cross-disciplinary enquiries into the human condition. In recent years, ideas, constructions and perceptions of ‘homes’ have been further complicated by constant shifts in conceptions and practices of transnational mobilities that have informed and disrupted ways of seeing, making and re-making homes at home and away from ‘home’. In this article, we draw from Sara Ahmed’s idea of home as ‘a space within us’ to read the novel We Need New Names (2013) by the transnational Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo as a text that interrogates the intertwined and complicated relationship between home, transnational identity and belonging. Focusing on the protagonist’s experiences in both Zimbabwe and America, this article examines the idea of home as it refracts uniquely twenty-first-century experiences, perceptions and notions of transnational spaces, and shapes certain notions of identity, transnationality and belonging in We Need New Names.