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This article explores the literary representations of the 'unsaid' and intangible connections of humanity across cultures as represented in Undisciplined Heart (2010), the memoir of the Namibian writer Jane Katjavivi. The central concerns are to examine how the author, through the act of writing, ascertains a new female identity within a culturally transforming Africa; how the fictionalization of her life is a revolutionary way of abdicating the role of silent white-female spectator in Africa; and how her story is a voice that matters in as much as it demonstrates the salient cultural relatedness and connectedness in Africa. The issues and concerns around transnational families, transculturalism, female subjectivity, agency, transnationality and multiculturalism are therefore central in this article. The guiding principles of this essay are Ubuntu (ubuntuism) and Afro-transnationalism in order to explore the sense of 'rainbowism' as articulated within a transnational, multiracial and multicultural literary text, Undisciplined Heart. The article brings to the fore the often overlooked presence of 'white' writing in postcolonial and post-independence Africa and provides some nuanced insights into the racial and cultural patterns of connectedness – the harmonious cross-cultural sense of being in an Africa that is both culturally and spatially diverse. The article also interrogates as well as problematizes the elusive and constantly changing issues of identity and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the years, the notion of home has permeated disciplinary, inter- and cross-disciplinary enquiries into the human condition. In recent years, ideas, constructions and perceptions of 'homes' have been further complicated by constant shifts in conceptions and practices of transnational mobilities that have informed and disrupted ways of seeing, making and re-making homes at home and away from 'home'. In this article, we draw from Sara Ahmed's idea of home as 'a space within us' to read the novel We Need New Names (2013) by the transnational Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo as a text that interrogates the intertwined and complicated relationship between home, transnational identity and belonging. Focusing on the protagonist's experiences in both Zimbabwe and America, this article examines the idea of home as it refracts uniquely twenty-first-century experiences, perceptions and notions of transnational spaces, and shapes certain notions of identity, transnationality and belonging in We Need New Names. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]