ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we cross from film to literature. Our takeoff point is the digital media presence of some of the best-known contemporary African and diasporic writers -the internet star status of novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole’s Twitter and Instagram experiments, and Binyawanga Wainaina’s online hit “How to Write about Africa” (2005) – as well as the more diffuse “internetting” of African literature since the 1990s. From there, I proceed to consider how digital media shape contemporary narratives of migration. I zoom in on one such narrative, NoViolet Bulawayo’s novel We Need New Names (2013), to examine the problematic of the border vis-à-vis both recent controversies surrounding the bordering of African writing – that is, how should we classify Europe- and US-based authors who claim an African identity – and the novel’s representation of the struggles and displacements engendered by contemporary migration movements and border crossings. Translation features prominently in this chapter as a political concept deployed to theorise the clash between homolingual conceptions of community constituted in the name of national or ethnolinguistic identity and heterolingual forms of collective subjectivation shaped by border crossings.
