Ghostly national imaginings and the (il)logic of capitalism in Meg Vandermerwe's Zebra Crossing.

This article uses Anderson's notions of national imaginings and calendrical coincidence as theoretical framework and the ideas of selected political economic theorists to examine Zebra Crossing's depiction of precarious illegal crossing of national borders by economically desperate Zimbabweans in the years leading up to the 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup held in South Africa. The novel foregrounds issues of identity by depicting challenges encountered by an orphan teenage girl with albinism not only to cross the physical border but her tragic failure to negotiate various socially constructed boundaries that result when destructive post-colonial African national imaginations collide with the global economy's insatiable anti-egalitarian logic of capital accumulation. With varying degrees of success, Zebra Crossing transgresses prevailing contemporary classificatory systems of literary works and many boundaries related to post-colonial African national imaginings as these intersect with the predatory features of contemporary global capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]