Precarious Identity, Displacement, and Belonging in Selasi’s Ghana Must Go and Bulawayo’s We Need New Names through the Lens of Afropolitanism

Abstract

Africans are no longer a stereotype of resistance to Western colonial oppression in the literature of African diasporic authors; instead, they can navigate the world with economic security and education. In Selasi's Ghana Must Go, the transcontinental migrations of the Sai family and in Bulawayo's We Need New Names, Darling's journey from a Zimbabwean shantytown to America, highlight how contemporary Africans can access a transcultural, globalized community while also illustrating their challenges in overcoming emotional crises, displacement, a sense of alienation, socioeconomic vulnerability, legal ambiguity, and strained community ties. By adopting cosmopolitan practices and transnational rhetoric, both novels share the Afropolitan ideal, a notion popularised by Selasi in her 2005 essay Bye-Bye-Babar. However, they diverge at one point: Bulawayo's work challenges the celebratory rhetoric of Afropolitanism by highlighting its protagonists' material and emotional struggles in coping with racial incompatibility and economic crisis, whereas Selasi's is a perfect example of Afropolitanism, showcasing its characters as economically privileged, educated, and elite. Using Afropolitanism as the theoretical framework and adopting the Critical Discourse Analysis as the methodology, this paper will examine the intersectional points of cosmopolitan practices as well as their irreversible deviations in these two novels.