ABSTRACT
Like Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo is one of the contemporary transcultural writers referred to by critics as ‘Afropolitans’. She uses an intermedial aesthetics to discuss African politics and the role of western mass media such as American television and its representation of Africa. This chapter sets out to investigate Bulawayo’s descriptive technique and socio-cultural effects of her ekphrases. Ekphrases and literary visuality are central strategies to enact the dissonances between African and American experiences and to give expression to the uneasy oscillation between belonging and un-belonging, identity and otherness and location and dislocation. Bulawayo’s technique of presenting two ekphrases of photographs taken at the same tense scene of colonial conflict is an intricate way of ‘writing back to/gazing back at’ the colonisers. While the pornographic ekphrases of scenes from films are detailed and stretch over several pages, references to and ekphrases of paintings and drawings in the second part of the novel are rare and short.
