TY - JOUR AU - Suárez-Rodríguez, Ángela PY - 2022/12/23 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Strangers and Necropolitics in NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names JF - International Journal of English Studies JA - Int. j. Engl. stud. VL - 22 IS - 2 SE - DO - 10.6018/ijes.508761 UR - https://revistas.um.es/ijes/article/view/508761 SP - 17-34 AB - <p>As a contribution to the recent call for the study of the figure of the stranger in African spaces (Ikhane, 2020), this article examines the first half of NoViolet Bulawayo’s <em>We Need New Names</em> (2013). The main reason for this, it is argued, is that the description of the protagonist’s pre-migratory living conditions throughout this part of the narrative reveals a Zimbabwean nation in which the necropolitics resulting from the failures of decolonisation have turned certain segments of the population into strangers in their own land. Their “living dead” status in a situation of social and spatial marginalisation recalls, in particular, the notion of the stranger as the “socially dead” (Rothe &amp; Collins, 2016). However, unlike this and other classical strangers living in a Western urban context, the literary strangers studied here do not represent an othered minority in the community but, rather, exemplify what appears to be a widely shared condition of “strangerness” in some contemporary African cities.</p> ER -