The Bulawayo Novel: In Praise of the Parochial

Abstract

This essay argues for reading parochially to reckon with local specificities of the Left in Anglophone fiction, more commonly studied as a global form. Focusing on Zimbabwean novels set in a provincial capital, Bulawayo, I examine how the proverbial second city’s oblique relation to a nominally socialist, centralized state apparatus like Zimbabwe’s, affords an ideal standpoint from which to critique the betrayals of hegemonic nationalist figures. I call for a shift away from persistent ideas of a global periphery and center, to instead argue that the parochial represents the center of a world, one among many.