African Street Literature: A Method for an Emergent Form Beyond World Literature

Abstract

This paper begins with the assertion that world literature is in danger of becoming a closed system, whereby literature anticipates its critical reception in both its form and content. Emergent African literary forms are often excluded from the field of world literature precisely because they demand methods of reading that challenge this anticipatory logic. We refer to this emergent literature circulating in African urban spaces as “African street literature.” This paper focuses on three such street forms: ephemeral print literature, flash fiction, and spoken word poetry. In all three cases, the literary form registers its situated-ness, and as such its location is co-constructive of the field of the literary text. The methodological intervention that the paper makes explores ways of reading context, material, form, and content as combined and codetermining without losing attention to the literariness of the text under examination.