The Short Story in South Africa

Contemporary Trends and Perspectives

Rebecca Fasselt, Corinne Sandwith, Rebecca Fasselt, Corinne Sandwith

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000562507
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Littérature
• Categoría: Critique littéraire africaine

This book considers the key critical interventions on short story writing in South Africa written in English since the year 2000.

The short story genre, whilst often marginalised in national literary canons, has been central to the trajectory of literary history in South Africa. In recent years, the short story has undergone a significant renaissance, with new collections and young writers making a significant impact on the contemporary literary scene, and subgenres such as speculative fiction, erotic fiction, flash fiction and queer fiction expanding rapidly in popularity. This book examines the role of the short story genre in reflecting or championing new developments in South African writing and the ways in which traditional boundaries and definitions of the short story in South Africa have been reimagined in the present. Drawing together a range of critical interventions, including scholarly articles, interviews and personal reflective pieces, the volume traces some of the aesthetic and thematic continuities and discontinuities in the genre and sheds new light on questions of literary form. Finally, the book considers the place of the short story in twenty-first century writing and interrogates the ways in which the short story form may contribute to, or recast ideas of, the post-apartheid or post-transitional.

The perfect guide to contemporary short story writing in South Africa, this book will be essential reading for researchers of African literature.

1 IntroductionThe short story in South Africa – new trends and perspectives

Corinne Sandwith, Rebecca Fasselt and Khulukazi Soldati-Kahimbaara

DOI: 10.4324/9781003226840-1

The genre of the short story, while often marginalised in national literary canons, has been central to the trajectory of literary history in South Africa. As Jean Marquard contends, “South African writing has excelled in this art form more than in any other” (1978: 11) and, as Mbulelo Mzamane reminds us, the “short story tradition in South Africa is as old as the Xhosa intsomi, the Zulu inganekwane, the Sotho tsomo, and other indigenous oral narrative forms” (1986: ix). Due to the sheer number of publications, the short story, Michael Chapman maintains, is arguably South Africa’s “most resilient and popular literary form” (2004: xii). Often described as a marginal or “ex-centric” genre (Hanson, 1989: 2), deemed ideal to capture the sensibilities of societal outcasts or “submerged population groups” (O’Connor, 1965: 18), the short story, according to Mary Louise Pratt, has frequently been employed “to introduce new regions or groups into an established national literature, or into an emerging national literature in the process of decolonization” (1994: 104).

In the South African context, where the idea of a national literature has been a vexed question in the past (Attwell and Attridge, 2012; Nkosi, 2002; Oliphant, 2004) and continues to be contested in the context of the country’s postapartheid shift towards a “transnational cosmopolitanism” (Frenkel, 2016: 4), the short story has been utilized by various population groups to claim belonging and/or express dissent with repressive political orthodoxies.¹ Most notably, however, short story criticism on apartheid as well as contemporary short story writing published in South Africa has consistently emphasised the genre’s disposition to capture the fragmented realities of socio-political transitions in the country (MacKenzie, 1999a; Marais, 2014; Oliphant, 1996). In recent years, the short story, Craig MacKenzie notes, “has undergone a renaissance […] and the signs are that the form is destined to play a major role in bodying forth South Africa’s future in imaginative terms” (1999a: 143). Several critics have observed a shift from the overtly politicised short story of the 1970s and 1980s to a return to a more literary and modernist aesthetics in the present (Oliphant, 1996; Titlestad, 2010). In this edited volume, 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.

Despite this noted resurgence of the short story, there has been a striking absence of critical literature on the genre (Chapman, 2003: 383), particularly in the post-2000s. To date, the main detailed studies of the form in South Africa are Craig MacKenzie’s The Oral-Style South African Short Story in English (1999b); Trudi Adendorff’s MA thesis South African Short Story Cycles: A Study of Herman Charles Bosman’s Mafeking Road; Pauline Smith’s The Little Karoo; Ahmed Essop’s The Hajji and Other Stories; and Bessie Head’s The Collector of Treasures, with Special Reference to Region and Community (1985); Pumla Gqola’s MA thesis Black Woman, You Are on Your Own: Images of Black Women in Staffrider Short Stories, 1978–1982 (1999); and the doctoral dissertations Writing Black: The South African Short Story by Black Writers by Rob Gaylard (2008); The South African Short Story and its Mediation of the Hegemonic Tendencies of Nationalism by Sopelekae Maithufi (2010); and (Re-)Inventing Our Selves/Ourselves: Identity and Community in Contemporary South African Short Fiction Cycles by Sue Marais (2014). The index in David Attwell and Derek Attridge’s The Cambridge History of South African Literature (2012) merely lists the entries “1950s white English writers”, “District Six Writers” and “Drum Magazine” under the rubric “short stories”, which all refer to Dorothy Driver’s contribution “The Fabulous Fifties: Short Fiction in English”. While a number of articles on short stories and short story collections by individual authors, most notably Ivan Vladislavić and Zoë Wicomb, have been published since 2000 (Coetzee, 2010; Driver, 2011; Gaylard, 2011; Griem, 2011; Kossew, 2010; Marais, 2014; Riach, 2015; Reid and Graham, 2017; Scully, 2011), a more sustained engagement with the genre in an edited volume seems warranted in the light of its increasing diversification and popularity. This volume aims to showcase the latest scholarship on short story writing in South Africa, written in English. The focus on short stories in English is restrictive given the long tradition and continuous vibrancy of short story writing in South Africa’s other languages. In contrast to Attwell and Attridge’s multilingual approach to South African literatures, the narrow scope of this volume is one of its major shortcomings and invites further scholarship that fully accounts for the conversations between short story writing in South Africa’s various languages.

The current edited volume explores questions such as: How does the short story genre reflect or champion new developments in South African writing? How are traditional boundaries and definitions of the short story in South Africa reimagined in the present? What specific aesthetic and thematic continuities and discontinuities can be observed in the contemporary short story? More specifically, we address the place of the short story in post-transitional or post-2000 writing and interrogate the ways in which the short story form may contribute to or recast ideas of the postapartheid or post-transitional.

As the various contributions demonstrate, contemporary short stories extend to numerous subgenres such as speculative fiction, crime fiction and erotic fiction, and increasingly examine and challenge conventional sexuality and/or gender-based norms and include characters who identify as LGBTQI+. This notable emphasis on the popular, rather than a shift towards a more modernist aesthetic, is visible in most of the selected stories and collections. Moreover, this collection of essays considers the position of South African short fiction within the context of an increasing popularity of new short story subgenres such as flash fiction, microfiction, postcard fiction and short short across the globe.² Various contributions also testify to a “denationalization” of the short story anthology in South Africa and a growing interest in cross-continental projects, fostering a pan-African short story culture. What is evident is the extent to which contemporary short story writing cultures continue to trouble conventional understandings of the category of South African literature itself. Reaching further beyond strictly text-centred approaches to contemporary short stories in South Africa, the volume addresses the influential character as well as the shortcomings of the most prominent short fiction prize for African writing, the Caine Prize. In an attempt to complicate strict boundaries between short story criticism and short story writing, the collection features reflective pieces by two of the most prominent contemporary short story writers in the country, Makhosazana Xaba and Siphiwo Mahala. It also includes interviews with Henrietta Rose-Innes, Niq Mhlongo and arts and culture entrepreneur Kgauhelo Dube, the founder of the LongStorySHORT initiative, an event series which features short story readings by local celebrities in community centres and libraries across the Tshwane region.

The critical reflections on recent short story writing in South Africa offered in this book are not intended to provide clear definitions or a finite set of key characteristics of the short story genre in the contemporary South African context. Cognizant of the fact that, as Joyce Carol Oates remarks, no definition of the short story is “quite democratic enough to accommodate an art that includes so much variety and an art that so readily lends itself to experimentation and idiosyncratic voices” (1998: 47), we conceive of the short story as an open, fluid and dynamic genre. While no single short story theory can fully cover the expanding and increasingly diverse body of short stories in South Africa, it remains imperative to investigate the ways in which short forms, short story collections and anthologies are adapted for, and rewritten in, the post-2000 context.

From democratic inclusivity to postapartheid disillusionment

Thinking of the short story simultaneously as a genre that has been especially prevalent in South Africa in times of social and political transition and as a genre in transition, we suggest in this section that the susceptibility of the short story to ambiguities, contradiction and open-endedness contributes to and reshapes ideas central to what has been called postapartheid and post-transitional literature (Frenkel and MacKenzie, 2010). We will first consider trends in short story criticism since the early 1990s alongside major developments that can be traced in short story anthologies, before attempting to tease out significant developments in the post-2000 era.

Short stories and the democratic vision of the 1990s

Developments in short story writing in South Africa in the early 1990s can only be understood against the background of aesthetic interventions that took place in the late 1980s. Most notable in this context is Njabulo Ndebele’s controversial critique of the “representation of spectacle” (1994: 41) in “protest” and “resistance” literature and his advancement of the category of “the ordinary” as an alternative mode for black writing that sought to move beyond simple binaries of oppressor-oppressed. While Ndebele does not comment on the short story genre as such, he refers to three stories by Michael Siluma, Joël Matlou and Bheki Maseko as exemplary of “the ordinary daily lives of people [that] should be the direct focus of political interest because they constitute the very content of the struggle, for the struggle involves people not abstractions” (1994: 57). His project has been criticised for homogenising black writing (Gaylard, 2009), eschewing the complex entanglements of “the ordinary” and “the spectacular” in apartheid and postapartheid culture (Jamal, 2010), and investing in a redemptive national teleology (Geertsema, 2001; Morphet, 1990, 1992). Yet, as Rob Gaylard notes, Ndebele’s central intervention was his interrogation of “the problems inherent in a too-easy or too-simple equation of ‘literature’ and ‘politics’ ” and his critique of “the view that only one style or mode of writing was appropriate or possible for a black writer in South Africa” (2009: 50). Ndebele’s discussion ...