Abstract

This paper examines the representation of migration and diasporic identity in NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut novel We Need New Names (2013), with particular attention to the ways in which the child protagonist, Darling, embodies the fractured experience of displacement from Zimbabwe to the United States. Through close textual analysis informed by postcolonial theory and Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity and the “Third Space,” the study explores how the novel negotiates cultural dislocation, memory, nostalgia, and the persistent struggle for belonging within a foreign and frequently hostile environment. It argues that Darling’s narrative dramatizes the liminal condition between home and host culture, exposing the tensions, negotiations, and psychological ruptures that constitute the contemporary immigrant journey. Far from offering a triumphal account of arrival and assimilation, Bulawayo presents migration as a profound destabilization of identity, especially acute for the young migrant who must reconcile conflicting cultural expectations during the formative years of selfhood. The analysis demonstrates that We Need New Names portrays diaspora simultaneously as opportunity and as loss, and that the child’s perspective deepens rather than simplifies this ambivalence. In doing so, the novel contributes meaningfully to contemporary understandings of transnational African literature and to broader debates about voice, mobility, and the unfinished work of identity in a globalized world.