African Short Stories Research Articles

Racialized Railway Mobilities: Repression and Resistance in the Anglophone South African Short Story During the Drum Decade

ABSTRACT South Africa has a complex history of racialized (im)mobilities. During the social engineering of apartheid, the city became a racialized white space that was dependent on black migrant workers who were forced to live in the marginal spaces on the edge of the city. This daily commute was enabled through the construction of public transportation systems and commuter railways. This mundane and banal form of mobility became a key site of both repression and resistance during the apartheid era. The present article explores how these racialized railway mobilities were represented during the ‘Drum decade’ of the 1950s in South Africa. It explores how the short story, as a liminal genre positioned within local and transnational literary cultures, is mobilized to narrate railway mobilities during this transitional decade. Texts analyzed include the news reports and short stories by Can Themba, Es’kia Mphahlele, and Nat Nakasa. This article explores how the mobile public spaces of the railways and the mobile figures of railway passengers were mobilized in the Anglophone South African short story as a form of resistance to the repression of the apartheid era.

African Short Story Writers and Intrapersonal Conflicts: A Critical Perspective on a Selected Short Story

African Short Story Writers and Intrapersonal Conflicts: A Critical Perspective on a Selected Short Story

Lusophone African Short Stories and Poetry after Independence: Decolonial Destinies ed. by Lamonte Aidoo, and Daniel F. Silva

Lusophone African Short Stories and Poetry after Independence: Decolonial Destinies ed. by Lamonte Aidoo, and Daniel F. Silva

Education and Female Agency in the Garden: Doris Lessing’s “Flavors of Exile”

Doris Lessing’s recent centenary brought opportunities to look at her works with fresh eyes. This is also the case with Lessing’s interest in education (Cairnie 2008; Sperlinger 2017), especially that of children in their transition to youth. This paper argues that this was an interest with which Lessing consistently concerned herself in both her fiction and non-fiction writings. Using the corpus of her African short stories as a primary reference framework, this paper studies “Flavours of Exile” (1957), a short story in which a family’s vegetable garden becomes a learning space for informal experimentation. The story is used by Lessing as a platform to raise her concerns about the education of the female subject in the historical context of decolonisation.

Genre versus Prize: The Short Story Form and African Oral Traditions

In “The Short Story in Africa,” Nadine Gordimer writes that the genre is more malleable and open to experimentation with style, language and form than the novel, which means that it is more easily accommodated within a variety of media spaces. Gordimer adds that the short story is “a fragmented and restless form, a matter of hit or miss, and it is perhaps for this reason that it suits modern consciousness” (170–71). Taking its cue from Gordimer’s remarks, this article attempts to examine the genre of the short story through the lens of the literary prize industry in Africa. In most parts of the continent the development of the short story, like that of the novel and other genres, has been slow, facing a number of challenges such as a historically impoverished publishing industry. The rise in popularity of the local and global literary prize for the short story has however played a significant role in the promotion of the genre and literature generally on the continent. The article examines the short story’s increased presence in the digital space and interrogates the general assumption on the part of many of the prize-awarding bodies that the short story can be linked to African oral traditions. The aim of the article is to explore the relationship between the genre and the rising popularity of the literary prize on the continent, focusing on the various ways in which the prize is (re)shaping the contemporary African short story.
 Keywords: Orality, literary prize, publishing, exoticism, literary fracture, disconnectivity

War-affected Children in Three African Short Stories: Finding Sanctuary within the Space of Placelessness

In short stories by three postcolonial African authors depicting war-affected children – Zimbabwean Dambudzo Marechera’s “The Camp” (1994, written in 1986), Nigerian Ben Okri’s “Laughter beneath the Bridge” (1986) and Ethiopian Maaza Mengiste’s “A Good Soldier” (2012) – the child protagonists are displaced and exist in precarious spaces of unbelonging. The conditions vividly evoked from these war-affected African children’s perspectives indicate that the unaccommodating “places” where the children find themselves propel them into terrifyingly featureless, engulfing and unrecognizable “non-places,” in need of sanctuary as a place of safety. Yet even in such places of desperation, the children somehow retain or find precarious shelter in “places” of love, tenderness and loyalty. war-affected children, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Ethiopia, displacement, sanctuary

Legacies of marxism? Contemporary African science fiction and the concern with literary realism

ABSTRACT The number of science fiction (SF) publications written by African authors skyrocketed in the new millennium and, alongside it, a debate on the form and sociological functions of that genre. In this essay, it is argued that this pan-African phenomenon of contemporary African SF, as well as the debate about it, may be understood in part as an attempt to come to terms with Africa’s Marxist-cultural inheritance and, particularly, literary realisms. However, this does not lead to the dissociation of African SF from Marxist realisms due to the way African SF was theorized. In fact, the negotiation of literary realisms is also registered in African SF works through the formal and intra-diegetic engagement with the problem of realism and the use of realist methods. In support of this thesis, the article undertakes short readings of several contemporary African SF short stories, novellas, and novels.

Analyses of Female Experiences in Two African Short Stories: The Feminist Theory Approach

Many African societies are patriarchal, based on the supremacy of the male over the female. According to Mba (2009, p.322), “emancipation of females is one of the greatest achievements of the women’s struggle globally”. As a continent, African culture accords a superior status to the male such that strength, freedom, independence, honour, courage and other positive attributes are ascribed to the male gender, while attributes of weakness, fear, dependence among others are ascribed to the female gender. Crimes of less magnitude are considered as “female” crimes and attract less stiff punishment. The killing of Ezeudu’s first son by Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart for example, is described as a female crime. On the nature of the crime, Achebe writes “the crime was of two kinds, male and female, Okonkwo committed the female because it had been inadvertent. He could return to the clan after some years” (p.87). In this paper, the Feminist theory is used to examine the portraiture of females in two short stories by two African female writers. In this article, the family is categorise as a fundamental part of the social life of Africans, it attempts to expose the bias of African culture against the female in favour of the male, and consider how this social reality impacts negatively on the female psyche. The stories reveal that women themselves aggravate the situation by working against themselves. We conclude that female empowerment is a must for all females, and that just as governments are projecting education for all by the year 2020, the women’s movement should also target education for all females by the year 2020, because as the stories reveal, the educated female character fares better in the society than her less literate counterpart.

“An Impossible Homecoming”: Migration and its challenges to identity in selected African Short Stories

“An Impossible Homecoming”: Migration and its challenges to identity in selected African Short Stories

Using South African short stories to create understanding and appreciation of diversity

Using South African short stories to create understanding and appreciation of diversity

The short story in South Africa post-2000: Critical reflections on a genre in transition

This editorial offers critical reflections on short story writing in South Africa post-2000. Against the background of critical scholarship on the short story form and thematic trends of short story anthologies since the late 1980s, we argue that short story criticism on apartheid as well as contemporary South African short story writing has consistently emphasized the genre’s disposition to capture the fragmented realities of socio-political transitions in the country. Critics have frequently observed a shift from the overtly politicized short story of the 1970s and 1980s to a return to a more literary and modernist aesthetics in the present. In this special issue, we intend to complicate this reading by mapping out other trajectories the short story has taken in recent years, which point toward the emergence of more popular subgenres such as speculative fiction, crime fiction, and erotic fiction. Short stories also increasingly examine and challenge conventional sexuality and/or gender-based norms.

Canine agents in two South African short stories

This article explores the role of the figure of the dog in two contemporary South African short stories. It considers the metaphorical-cum-allegorical significance of the textual animal in these texts, asking how the writers use dogs as imaginative devices to draw attention to issues of gender, human emotions or psychoses, and the avowal or disavowal of (human and animal) agency. The aim is to engage with the writers’ evident wish both to comment on human-animal relationships and encounters in contemporary South African society, and to emphasise how these become effective, affective means of commenting on the continued inequities of post-apartheid society.

Book Review: <i>Recognition: An Anthology of South African Short Stories</i>

Book Title: Recognition: An Anthology of South African Short Stories Book Author: David Medalie (Ed.) Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press, 2017. 295 p. ISBN 978-1-77614-036-7

Imagining Africa’s futures in two Caine Prize-winning stories: Henrietta Rose-Innes’s “Poison” and NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest”

Since its launch in 1999, the annual Caine Prize for African short stories has assumed a dominant position on the continent’s literary landscape. It has been hailed for the exposure it provides for its winners who are mostly budding writers. Expectedly, it has also attracted stinging criticism, especially for what is perceived to be its legitimization of stereotypical narratives about Africa. In this article, I examine how the two winning entries of 2008 and 2011 represent contemporary African realities and in so doing reinforce the growing significance of the prize and the short story genre to modern African literary expression. I argue that, taken together, Henrietta Rose-Innes’ “Poison” (2007) and NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest” (2010), both set in cities, contribute to problematic imaginings of African futures. Bulawayo does this through her representation of slum life and dystopian childhoods in Zimbabwe while Rose-Innes’s story speculates on the apocalyptic aftermath of a chemical explosion in post-apartheid South Africa. I highlight, also, how these two narratives reflect apparent relationships between the short story and the novel in contemporary African writing as well as the increasing role of the postcolonial city as a site from which unfavourable visions of postcolonial societies are generated.

(Un)solving global challenges: African short stories, literary awards and the question of audience

Recent discussions on the African short story tend to focus on the efforts to promote short-story writing, especially through literary prizes. Critics sceptical of such prizes argue that writers may be tempted to write only on topics that the audience hosting the prize is eager to read about. Only rarely do such conversations on the African short story critically engage with the stories. Doing so would reveal that four recent award-winning African short stories, Folarin’s ‘Miracle', Bulawayo’s ‘Hitting Budapest', Osondu’s ‘Waiting', and Owuor’s ‘The Weight of Whispers', set into relief global problems such as poverty, hunger, political strife and immigration to carry a caustic critique of the very audience to whose tastes they are believed to pander. I locate this critique in examples of refusals of assistance, roundabout comments and misconstruals of meaning as the ways in which the solutions are deferred. I call these examples gaps between problems and solutions that all four authors use to point out the failure of largely Western-based aid agencies such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and other organizations in solving global challenges. This accusation of Western-based agencies, folded into a surprising critique of the audience who crowns the fiction of these writers, becomes obvious when these stories are read in opposition to iterations that theorize the world as independent of national boundaries. The short stories, I argue, thus develop a supplementary critique.

The transnational anglophone African short story: From resistance literature to prize culture

Abstract The father of African literature, Chinua Achebe, begins his introduction to The Anchor Book of Modern African Short Stories with ‘Literary Historians tell us that the English novel preceded the short story by a hundred years or thereabouts. In modern African literature events happened differently. The short story came first ...’. Despite its central role in the development of African literature as evidenced by early collections by Africa’s most prominent writers, the inclusion of African short fiction in seminal journals such as Black Orpheus and Transition, as well as its continued deployment today by many of Africa’s most prominent writers, such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Helon Habila, critical attention in the fields of African literature, postcolonial literature and world literature to the African short story has been minimal. As Ernest Emenyonu points out in a special edition of African Literature Today, ‘National and international conferences and colloquiums continue to be held in Africa and elsewhere to address the issues and challenges associated with the novel, poetry and drama in African literature, with virtually no attention paid to the short story’. This article seeks to address this oversight by briefly examining the history of the African short story as central to the development of African literature and explaining its continued resonance. By tracking the trajectory of the short story in Africa through its multiple phases, this article addresses the oversight pointed out by Emenyonu and articulates a methodology for considering the African short story in a transnational context, particularly in light of the re-emerging field of world literature.

Thematic Concerns in the African Short Story

Thematic Concerns in the African Short Story

“It left shame in me, lodged in my body”: Representations of shame, gender, and female bodies in selected contemporary South African short stories

I offer a feminist literary analysis of gendered representations of shame in selected contemporary South African short stories. The analysis reveals how the dynamics of shaming operate by drawing on social constructions that continue to devalue and denigrate women’s bodies. The female characters’ narratives are littered with “I should haves” and other indications that shame fulfils a powerful disciplinary function that causes women to modify their behaviour and sanction their feelings in a futile quest to avoid shame. I demonstrate that this is a futile endeavour because female characters are bombarded with messages of shame from so many different avenues that it becomes impossible for any of them to emerge unscathed. The shame that they cannot escape resides in their bodies and the article seeks to listen to the corporeal articulations of shame in an attempt to acknowledge a potent, yet often silenced, aspect of women’s daily lived realities.

Familial cartographies in contemporary East African short stories

Using two East African short stories by Binyavanga Wainiana and Muthoni Garland, this article explores literal, literary and nation-families as recurrent motifs in contemporary East African short stories, which comment on intergenerational relationships and the ensuing patterns of power relations. If, as much scholarship on the post-colonial state opines, the disintegration of the state in Africa ushered in a shift towards family networks, and, broadly, the domestic space, then contemporary East African short stories would seem to suggest that the refuge offered by the family space has, at best, been fraught with contradictions, with the familial space emerging as both a space of healing and a site haunted by the same predatory dynamics that mark the phallocratic state. It is in this environment that the arts – music, literature and other arts – seem to offer a platform for cross-generational critical engagement.

Daring to Speak Its Name: The Representation of a Lesbian Relationship in the Work of Rozena Maart

This article explores the representation of a lesbian relationship in a contemporary South African short story. It takes an intersectional approach to the reading of lesbianism and considers how the race, gender and the geographical location of the lesbian body restrict the relationship options that are open to lesbians in a society where heterosexual partnering constitutes the norm. By means of a close reading of ‘No Rosa, No District 6’ by Rozena Maart, the article illustrates the heteronormative pressures that structure the daily choices that lesbians must make in their relationships with one another as well as the ways in which other characters make sense of these relationships. While the researcher's work is motivated by a desire to address the silencing that seems to characterize much of the scholarly engagement with South African works of fiction that depict lesbianism, the focus of the article is on the textual representations of heteronormativity, and lesbian defiance thereof, as depicted in Maart's short story.