ABSTRACT This article analyses precarity as variously represented in NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013) and Meg Vandermerwe’s Zebra Crossing (2013). We Need New Names was characterized as formulaic “poverty porn”, a term that could equally be applied to Zebra Crossing. Challenging the use of this problematic term to censure novels for exposing dire conditions in African countries, the article uses the technique of reparative reading, and applies the insights of Helen Hester to “poverty porn”, to show that the effects of compassion and prurience aroused by such texts can stimulate readers’ impulse for meaningful reflection leading to changed attitudes. It then refutes what Brian Bwesigye calls the “identity wars” between Afropolitans based overseas and Africans living in and writing about the African continent, and highlights the vernacular cosmopolitanism of both novels, which depict culturally specific precarity, but make appeals to the active sympathies of readers in both global south and global north.

中文翻译：

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NoViolet Bulawayo 的《我们需要新名字》和 Meg Vandermerwe 的《斑马线》中的不稳定、贫困色情和白话世界主义

摘要 本文分析了 NoViolet Bulawayo 的《我们需要新名字》（2013 年）和 Meg Vandermerwe 的《斑马线》（2013 年）中所表现的不稳定。我们需要新名字的特点是公式化的“贫困色情”，这个术语同样适用于斑马线。文章挑战使用这个有问题的术语来谴责揭露非洲国家可怕状况的小说，文章使用了修复阅读的技术，并将海伦海斯特的见解应用于“贫困色情”，表明同情和贪婪的影响引起了通过这样的文本可以激发读者进行有意义的反思的冲动，从而改变态度。然后，它驳斥了布赖恩·布韦西格 (Brian Bwesigye) 所说的海外非裔与居住在非洲大陆并撰写有关非洲大陆的非洲人之间的“身份战争”，