Ways of Reading Blackness: Exploring Stereotyped Constructions of Blackness in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names

Abstract

SummaryThis article focuses on NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel We Need New Names, and discusses the ways in which she explores the life of the young protagonist and her friends living in a country in the midst of an economic and political crisis. The article argues that Bulawayo’s depiction of 10-year old Darling’s life and that of her impoverished community makes extensive use of stereotypes of blackness that are consistent with white constructions of the black other. This reinforces Western notions of Africa through the use of a number of tropes that have come to be considered representative of Africa within the Western literary canon. The article further asserts that, because the children continually perform their poverty, there is an underlying equating of poverty with moral laxity, which renders the novel “poverty porn”. Instead of illuminating the suffering of this community, it merely serves to deny it humanity as it engages in a Bakhtnian carnivalesque performance in response to vagaries of the postcolony. Finally, the article argues that it is too simplistic to suggest that this mode of representation of blackness is driven merely by a desire to appeal to the implied white western reader, and rather explores ideas relating a double consciousness on the part of the author.