New names, translational subjectivities: (Dis)location and (Re)naming in NoViolet Bulawayo'sWe Need New Names

NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names – shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner the Etisalat Prize for Literature in 2013 – is a novel in which the leitmotif of (re)naming the trope of migration to the (dis)location and translation of subjectivities. Based the premise that the movement of subjects from one social context to another is to the translation of text from one language to another, this paper proposes a mode of subjectification. However, I argue against reading Darling’s journey Zimbabwean shanty dweller to illegal immigrant in America as a linear progression an original (located) to a translated (dislocated) subjectivity. I further argue that the goes beyond the idea of ‘transparent translation’ – a visible layering of a translated over a discrete original subjectivity – by privileging their inter-permeability. and cognitive dissonance are read as textual markers of the psychic (dis)location by displaced subjects. This analysis of Darling’s childhood and adolescent leads me to conclude that the novel’s leitmotif of (re)naming as a call for a hermeneutic code through which translational subjectivities can be understood.