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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

post-2000 South African literature short story anthology South African short story

Introduction

The genre of the short story, while often marginalized 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 in South Africa has consistently emphasized 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). 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 (Oliphant, 1996; Titlestad, 2010). 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.

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 only 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’s 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 collections² 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; Ried and Graham, 2017; Scully, 2011), a more sustained engagement with the genre in a special issue seems warranted in the light of its increasing diversification and popularity. This special issue aims to showcase the latest scholarship on short story writing in South Africa written in English. The focus on short stories in English is, admittedly, restrictive given the long tradition and continuous vibrancy of short story writing in South Africa’s other languages. In contrast to Attwell’s and Attridge’s multilingual approach to South African literatures, the narrow scope of this special issue 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 issue 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, the issue addresses the place of the short story in post-transitional or post-2000 writing and interrogates 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 special issue 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.³ 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. Reaching further beyond strictly text-centred approaches to contemporary short stories in South Africa, the issue addresses the influential character as well as the shortcomings of the most prominent short fiction prize for African writing, the Caine Prize. It also includes interviews with Henrietta Rose-Innes 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 below 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. 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 criticized for homogenizing 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 of the short story form, we suggest, paved the way for the multiplicities of short story writing in the postapartheid era.

Criticism on the short story genre from the 1990s onwards seems divided between earlier accounts that focus largely on the short story anthology as an apt medium for the expression of democratic multiplicity and later criticism which, in contrast to these celebratory readings, highlights the genre’s performance of uncertainty and disequilibrium. Commenting on the popularity of the short story in the 1990s, Andries Walter Oliphant writes that “[i]n fluid and transitory contexts such as present-day South Africa” the short story “can be practiced to great effect” (1996: 62). For him, “[t]he fractured and discontinuous articulations which a body of short stories produces over a particular period” (1996: 62) offer the reader a multiplicity of viewpoints, defying former hegemonic narratives of the apartheid era. The palpable tension between unity and difference, centripetal and centrifugal forces, exhibited in short fiction collections or “cycles”, as Sue Marais contends, are “especially appropriate to a rendering of the tensions and possibilities inherent in a multifarious and ruptured society in the process of attempting to transform itself into a unified but culturally diverse democracy” (2014: 14).

The forms of the short story cycle and the short story anthology in this sense both express the postcoloniality of “normativity and proleptic designation” and “interstitial or liminal” postcoloniality, two trends that Biodun Jeyifo observes in postcolonial writing. While the former refers to a postcoloniality “in which the writer or critic speaks to, or for, or in the name of the post-independence nation-state”, the latter in Jeyifo’s account refers to African writers of a hybrid cosmopolitan sensibility, often based in the global north, whose writing exhibits an “interstitial or liminal mode” (1990: 53). The short story collection, like many postcolonial novels, expresses both designations, suggesting “that it is preferable to speak of the two poles as a dialectical continuum, rather than as polarized and mutually exclusive entities” (Quayson, 2016: 6). With its specific compositional display of unity and difference, the short story collection becomes a particularly powerful means to express the tension between the normative, futurist agenda of “wholeness” on the one end of this continuum and the hybrid and interstitial designation on the other. In the early transition years in South Africa, the “singular-yet-plural” format of the short story collection thus comes to mirror the proleptic, normative nation-building project without, however, obfuscating the liminal mode as an intrinsic characteristic of the genre.⁴

This development is echoed in a number of short story anthologies which appeared after the unbanning of the ANC and the release of political prisoners in 1991. This body of anthologies includes those which engage with apartheid history as constitutive of the present, on the one hand, and those in which the present and the future claim the greater attention, on the other. Exemplifying the former orientation, Denis Hirson and Martin Trump’s The Heinemann Book of South African Short Stories (1994) reiterates an earlier liberal emphasis on the diversity of the collection as a means of contesting the ethos of segregation in both the social and the literary spheres, thus advancing an ethics/aesthetics of inclusiveness, dialogue, and connection. In the unstable interregnum between the fall of the national narrative and the rise of the individual story, collections such as Trump and Marquard’s revised Century (1993) and David Medalie’s Encounters (1997) continue to give value to those stories in which the public and the personal, the individual and the social, are intertwined. In addition, however, what is identified as the “master narrative of apartheid” leads to a new recognition of historical complexity and a privileging of stories which, eschewing the apartheid dominant, give space to previously obscured dimensions of human experience. As is evident in Stephen Gray’s description of his 1993 anthology as a collection of “pieces” rather than stories, many of the anthologies that emerge in this period also resist the notion of the story as polished, internally coherent, and complete. In addition, against the attempt to arrive at an “all-encompassing definition” of the story (Medalie, 1997: xxii), these collections tend to privilege multiplicity and dissensus.

Many collections which appear in this period are characterized by tropes of regeneration, renewal, innovation, and change as well as a euphoric refusal of the past (Gray, 1993; Macphail and Esterhuizen, 1993; Oliphant, 1992, 1999). To some extent, the emphasis on rupture rather than continuity necessitates a caricatural treatment of the past in which the “rigid” and “outmoded” political orthodoxy of apartheid is conflated with the aesthetics of realism. In the call for formal experimentation and the scrambling of generic categories, what was previously conceived of as a developing realist tradition is re-imagined as aesthetic stricture. During this period, if the anthology of the survey retains a presence (MacKenzie, 1999a; Malan, 1999), it is the anthology representing the contemporary writing moment which takes centre stage.

MacKenzie’s (1999a) anthology Transitions, presenting a survey of short stories published between 1948 and 1992, also complicates domineering ideas of “newness” in anthologies of the 1990s by consciously selecting short stories that focus on change and renewal across time. Significantly, he emphasizes the eminently ambiguous temporality and interminable process of socio-political transitions: “The transitions that these stories explore”, he suggests,

are not complete — and never will be. In 1948 [Herman Charles] Bosman stood on the threshold of a dark era in South African history. Fifty years later we are again faced with fundamental societal change, this time of a more hopeful nature. Writers over the next fifty years will chart the future transitions. (MacKenzie, 1999a: vi)

While this focus on change, evinced in each of the short stories in this collection, appears to invest the present with a similar measure of hope as the anthologies focusing on “the new”, MacKenzie seems more interested in drawing attention to modes of continuity in South African short story writing.

Oliphant’s earlier-cited article similarly cautions against accounts that locate the resurgence of the short story in the 1990s in the irreducible specificities of that historical moment. Referring to the groundbreaking short stories by Bessie Head and Can Themba, he calls for a “broader framework incorporating the ongoing dialogue between past and present narratives” (1996: 62). Deeply sceptical of hasty pronouncements of “newness”, he maintains that “the new” is always imbedded in “an open-ended and unfolding narrative procss in which the short story as a genre, to paraphrase Jacques Derrida, always participates in several genres” (1996: 62).

Notwithstanding Oliphant’s reservations, the emphasis on the new, the aesthetically experimental, and the hitherto unexplored continues in what has been termed the post-transitional period (Frenkel and MacKenzie, 2010) and is exemplified in a range of new short story collections such as Dave Chislett’s three Urban collections (2001, 2002, 2003), Chris van Wyk’s Post-Traumatic: New South African Short Stories (2003), and Maire Fisher’s Women Flashing: A Collection of Fiction from Women’s Writing Workshops (2005). As in the mid-1990s, the emphasis on the “fresh”, the “original”, and the “now” predominates. The single example of the conventional survey anthology to appear during this period is Michael Chapman’s New Century of South African Short Stories (2004). However, even this collection rejects the authority and coherence of the anthology as “field guide” by presenting itself as a “miscellany”, a “collection of diverse voices”. It also picks up an earlier questioning of definitive form in an extended discussion of the story as fleeting, provisional, and incomplete.

Following the theoretical trend to define the short story genre in juxtaposition to the novel (Beevers, 2008: 15), Chapman contends that “the big narrative of the novel was perhaps the most appropriate response to the national question” (2004: xi) during apartheid. The renewed interest in the short story, he contemplates, may be due to the inconclusiveness of the short form and the short story collection, which he deems a pertinent medium to capture South African society in transition:

Whereas the novel is equated with big ideas, big events, the story favours flexibility, ellipses, surprise, emotion, implication. With large, singular plots (the narrative of nationalism or socialism) discredited, the story permits us smaller, various, often unconventional insights. These find consonance in a country in the complexity of its transition from an authoritarian order to a civil imaginary. The multiplicity of voices in a collection of stories suggests the range and diversity of our possibilities. (Chapman, 2004: xi)

Chapman’s quote highlights the potential of the short story and, perhaps even more so, that of the short story anthology to undermine “the idea of the book as necessarily unified, complete, in some small sense representing, standing (in) metonymically for a complete, unified world” (Hanson, 1989: 7). In its enabling of the “diversity of our possibilities”, the short story collection here appears to become the democratic genre par excellence,⁵ echoing the early postapartheid national narrative of reconciliation and “unity in diversity”.

Chapman’s claim, even if tentative, that the “big narrative of the novel” (2004: xi) might be the more fitting form to engage with the domineering theme of apartheid, may, however, run the risk of obscuring the narrative impact of the short story genre before the 1990s. While his introduction provides a survey of the South African short story over time, Chapman’s emphasis on the short story as a genre particularly germane to the present moment eschews the earlier noted continuities in its deployment, which gesture towards its suitability for literary expression during crucial moments of transition throughout South African history. Because of its brevity, immediacy, and presumed intensity, the short form has repeatedly been regarded as a viable avenue for the expression of social resistance in times of rapid political and socio-economic change.

For most writers of the Drum era, which marked “the substantial beginning, in South Africa, of the modern black short story” (Chapman, 2001: 183), the short story constituted a popular form to voice dissent and document apartheid’s exclusionary racist politics and the dire social and material realities. The Drum decade was very much an era of transition and the short stories of the time, favouring a realist aesthetics of documentation, set their plots against the backdrop of South Africa’s “rapid transition into an industrialized urban country” (Graham, 2007: 170). In this sense, Drum, as Lewis Nkosi suggests, “wasn’t so much a magazine as it was a symbol of the new African cut adrift from the tribal reserve — urbanised, eager, fast-talking and brash” (1983: 8; see also Gready, 2002). The short story, as a result of material conditions that writers deemed unsuitable for the production of novels, became, not least because of Drum’s editorial policy, the period’s foremost literary output with more than 80 short stories published in one decade (Zander, 1999: 136). The new urbanity that Drum epitomized thus found its most appropriate literary medium in the short story. Bloke Modisane, for instance, maintains that the short story “serves an urgent, immediate, intense, concentrated form of unburdening yourself — and you must unburden yourself” (1963: 3). Similarly, Es’kia Mphahlele, influenced by Richard Wright’s and Langston Hughes’s deployment of the short form in the context of racial oppression in the US as well as by Nadine Gordimer’s modernist stories, draws on the genre’s ability to capture the momentous force of apartheid:

Perhaps the sense of urgency, the desire to say things that plagued one’s thoughts […] — all these and other things prompted one to look for a short cut to prose effects. One had to spill out one’s thoughts in the most direct manner, and the short story seemed well suited for this. (Mphahlele, 1969: 474)

Ruptures and continuities post-2000

While there seems to be a new emphasis on the pleasures rather than the politics of stories in the post-2000 period, these stories continue to be informed by an understanding of the short story as a “concentrated form of unburdening yourself” (Modisane, 1963: 3), albeit with a reconfigured idea of political commitment that leaves behind apartheid and transition-era visions of nationalism, focusing on marginal figures and formations of transnational exchange and connectivity, specifically with other African countries. The exploration of hitherto unexplored areas of experience such as sex, sexuality, and subjectivity is evident in titles such as Identities (De Kock and Southey, 2002), Attitudes (de Villiers, 2004), and Touch (Szczurek, 2009). This period is also characterized by the rise of the more popular commercial anthology, variously comprising the niche anthology — stories of personal emancipation, erotic stories (Schimke, 2008), queer stories (Martin and Xaba, 2013; Xaba and Martin, 2017), crime stories, science fiction stories, and flash fiction — and the (overlapping) anthology-by-invitation in which writers contribute stories relating to a particular theme. Xaba and Martin’s anthologies also break with anthologies of the proleptic designation of the early 1990s, bringing into dialogue queer short stories from across the continent. This trans-African focus echoes earlier initiatives such as Stephen Gray’s anthology Writers Territory (1973) which includes stories from South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. The shift to a postapartheid aesthetic and the break with the South African survey anthology tradition is emphasized in new forms of visual staging such as the retro tabloid styles of Twist: Short Stories Inspired by Tabloid Headlines (Morris and Moffett, 2006) and gritty, urban designs of Urban 01, Urban 02 and Urban 03. Post-2000 collections also mark their distance from established form through the use of unconventional layout and typographical styles. The break with tradition is also suggested in various forms of paratextual apparatus which tend to be far less elaborate than earlier examples, are more oriented towards a popular readership, and tend to employ a more informal and accessible style.

In 2013, two short story competitions were established which also often revolve around a theme. Short Story Day Africa seeks to counter what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her famous TED talk (2009) termed “the danger of the single story” about Africa. As the organizers write on the website, “Short Story Day Africa has established a day, 21st June — the shortest day of the year — on which to celebrate the diversity of Africa’s voices and tell you who we really are; what we love; love to eat, read, write about” (Short Story Day Africa, n.d.: n.p.). The initiative brings together short stories from across the continent and publishes a selection of the best entries in an annual anthology. The anthologies Migrations (Chela et al., 2017), Water (Mulgrew and Szczurek, 2016), Terra Incognita (Dorman, 2013), and Feast, Famine, and Potluck (Jennings, 2013), as well as the 2017 theme “ID” that focuses on identity, especially gender identity and sexuality, further testify to the diversification of themes, trans-African dialogues, and the growing interest in popular fiction in recent short story writing.

Initiated in the same year, the Short.Sharp.Stories award is organized by the National Arts Festival and aims to provide a platform for fiction at the drama-dominated festival (Warren, 2014: 616). The annual call equally focuses on a specific theme and the best entries are published each year in a collection. The inaugural anthology, titled Bloody Satisfied (2013) was edited by Joanne Hichens and focused on the theme of crime. In 2014, the project published Adults Only: Stories of Love, Lust, Sex and Sensuality (Hichens, 2014). Subsequent collections are: Incredible Journey (Hichens, 2015) and Die Laughing (Hichens, 2016) — which features stories “of wit, satire and humour” in which “writers have poked a little fun at our crazy country, at our politics, our idiosyncrasies, our down-right ridiculous habits” (Short.Sharp.Stories, n.d.: n.p.) — and Trade Secrets (Hichens, 2017). Echoing initiatives by the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW) to promote short story writing in the past, these short story prizes point to the ongoing significance of the genre in the contemporary South African literary landscape, but also to the viability of the form for cross-continental collaboration and literary exchange.⁶

Whereas these anthologies seem to advocate the novelty of the present and a break with past stylistic and thematic paradigms, recent short story criticism (Titlestad, 2010; Barnard, 2012) that has turned to critically investigating the parameters of the short form in relation to the notion of “post-transitional literature” (Frenkel and MacKenzie, 2010) appears more vigilant around this language of innovation. Like MacKenzie (1999a) and Oliphant (1996), these accounts bear witness to significant elements of continuity in the employment of the short form across the differentials of the apartheid, transitional, and post-transitional phases. The short story anthology is now no longer read as a demonstration of democratic multiplicity. However, the renewed interest in the short story, particularly the modernist short story with its proclivity for fragmentation and open-endedness, is regarded as a pertinent medium for the expression of postapartheid disillusionment or the acknowledgement that the “forward march” version of transition has been conclusively derailed, leaving indeterminacy and plot loss in its place (De Kock, 2016: 15). Michael Titlestad writes:

In some respects, the modernist short story […] might be particularly suited to our present, just as other modes of the short story were appropriate to our past. The smaller canvas of the genre compels an author to devise situations and moments of interiority (recognition, resignation, hope or aspiration) that distil the swirling realities of the world. At their best, modernist short stories are never pedantic; they never resolve the matters they raise, but rather leave both their characters and readers suspended on the brink of a recognition that remains — for all of its powerful implications — somewhat inchoate, just out of reach. In a transitional context like ours, in which most of us experience the world as difficult to read, this hesitation, this modest authorial purview, seems entirely apt. (2010: 191−192)

It appears, then, that the earlier association of the short story, specifically the short story anthology, with the “normative and proleptic” nation-building project has given way to an emphasis on the genre’s aspects of liminality, fragmentation, and implication rather than resolution. It is in this sense that the short story in recent years, as Rita Barnard observes, has “enabled attention to smaller, more local ways of meaning […] because as a form it is less subject to the pressure of being interpreted as national allegory (or at least, state-of-the nation report) than the novel” (2012: 666). If the “present moment” for the short story writer who, as Nadine Gordimer famously argues, “see[s] by the light of the flash” (1968: 459), was “the only thing one can be sure of” during apartheid, this fleeting certainty has given way to even more pervasive restlessness and fragmentation. Yet Titlestad’s discussion of the modernist short story as “particularly suited” for “a transitional context like ours” (as well as his predominant focus on an older generation of writers such as Medalie, Vladislavić, and Wicomb) tends to flatten out some of the complexities and nuances of the contemporary literary scene. As this special issue shows, authors use and adapt various forms of the genre for a range of political interventions which move beyond a strict bifurcation of the short story into either more political/popular or avant-gardist iterations. These sentiments are echoed in several contributions to this issue. In an interview with Graham Riach, Henrietta Rose-Innes observes:

These brief, eclectic contributions also feel like a natural and appropriate way to consider South Africa now, or perhaps any fractured, various, rapidly changing milieu — particularly for someone who is wary of sweeping statements. It’s hard for anyone to have a good overview of what’s happening with our country, to the extent that it can feel artificial and hubristic to try. Rather than a magisterial narrative, it may be that a mosaic of stories, its overall form undefined and with the capacity for new elements to be added quickly to the mix, might be the best and most honest commentary on our condition. (2020b: 113)

More recent subgenres of the short story further add to this interpretative focus on indeterminacy, rapid change, adaptability, and a loss of the proleptic vision. Peter Blair suggests in his article on flash fiction that this subgenre, “a minimally plotted narrative that maximizes implication”, is “apt to the under-plotted indeterminacy of the post-transition”. “The striking correlation between transition’s demise and the flash’s rise may be as much coincidence as causation”, he concedes, “but it at least suggests that the advent of post-transition was conducive to, perhaps a stimulus for, the flash” (2020: 42). In a similar vein, Andrew van der Vlies’s Present Imperfect (2017) and Kerry Bystrom’s Democracy at Home in South Africa (2016) suggest that negotiations of queer identities in short stories by Medalie and Wicomb disrupt proleptic, heteronormative conceptions of the national family. Taking these arguments further, Sally-Ann Murray examines the short story as a queer form in this special issue.

Next to these formal innovations, the realist short story continues to offer writers a platform to express social criticism through the exploration of a murky social terrain that eschews grand narratives with a clearly defined moral plane. Young writers, such as Niq Mhlongo, Siphiwo Mahala, Lidudumalingani Mqombothi, Mohale Mashigo, Masande Ntshanga, and Jolyn Phillips, employ the form to comment on various aspects of postapartheid society such as gender inequality, homophobia, land ownership, xenophobia, corruption and leadership, racism, and economic disparities. Mhlongo’s 2016 Affluenza has been described as a “smart, chatty, wandering collection of twelve stories about a society that has lost its way” (Ifeh, 2016: n.p.). Examining the phenomenon of “affluenza”, “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more” (De Graaf et al., 2000: 2) expressed through the blending of “affluence” and “influenza”, the titular story provides yet another metaphor for the “morbidly diseased” (De Kock, 2016: 196) state of the country, a trope that according to Leon de Kock suffuses much recent writing. In Mhlongo’s story, the contrast between the theme of “overload” and the short story’s limited narrative space and fragmentary nature cogently dramatizes the failures of the transition project. The ending of the short story, where the characters Fana and Sanele find themselves in a fatal situation, trapped in a dilapidated apartment block by a trio of glamorous women they have just flirted with at a high-end Sandton bar, points toward the deadly culture of conspicuous consumption. With this unexpected turn of events, the story becomes a parody of postapartheid deception and pretence, reminiscent of Can Themba’s social satire in the Drum era. The trickster, a liminal figure par excellence (Baker, 1998) who populates many of the short stories in Mhlongo’s (2016) collection, serves as yet another reminder of the long tradition of the form in South Africa as well as its oral origins. While signalling new directions in contemporary short fiction, Affluenza challenges the tendency of previous collections to conceive the postapartheid short story in terms of rupture. This intertextual dialogue surfaces even more prominently in contemporary rewritings of Can Themba’s “The Suit” by Zukiswa Wanner, Siphiwo Mahala, and Makhosazana Xaba, attesting to what Evan Mwangi (2009) calls Africa’s “writ[ing] back to self” in its treatment of gender and sexuality (see Murray’s contribution to this issue). It is through this ongoing conversation with former short story writers that the post-2000 short story takes stock of the contemporary moment.

The short story in postapartheid South Africa continues to be a viable genre for the depiction of transitional moments. While earlier short story collections and anthologies marked the hopeful vision of democratic multiplicity of the early 1990s, post-2000 short stories are characterized by increasing generic diversification as well as a shift towards a privileging of liminality and fragmentation that becomes symptomatic of the thwarted promises of the country’s political transition. It is to this troubling of both aesthetic form and political certainty that many of the articles in this special issue are addressed.

Special issue outline

In the first article, Graham Riach (2020b) examines the politics of space in Henrietta Rose-Innes’s short story “Falling” from her 2010 collection Homing. Drawing on Joseph Frank’s and W. J. T. Mitchell’s work on spatial form in literature, he suggests that Rose-Innes’s use of “imperfect spatial cadences” becomes a powerful narrative means through which the author dramatizes the fraught and unresolved question of spatial distribution in postapartheid South Africa. While the final spatial cadence in “Falling” offers “formal closure” and “partial catharsis”, the story, Riach argues, persistently foregrounds the tension between aesthetic closure and lived local realities and spatial politics, rather than progressing toward neat formal and political resolutions. Riach shows that a reading of the workings of space in “Falling” needs to take as its starting point the author’s adaptation of the genre’s genealogy of spatial form to the specifics of the South African postapartheid context.

Peter Blair’s (2020) article looks to the wider short story landscape in order to address the recent efflorescence of flash fiction in South Africa, exploring its historical antecedents, the history of its inclusion in general anthologies, and its particular resonance for the South African context. Aside from noting the distinctive characteristics of “hyper-compression”, intertextual allusion, and interpretive gaps, Blair also reads flash fiction as troubling the conventional dualism of surface and depth. The article provides a detailed analysis of several examples of the post-transitional flash, including work by Tony Eprile, Michael Cawood Green, and Stacy Hardy. Noting the relative scarcity of flash fiction in South African short story anthologies, and its absence from major literary-historical surveys, Blair makes a compelling argument for its wider literary-historical value as important distillation or refraction of contemporary literary-critical concerns.

Kirby Manià’s (2020) “Translated from the Dead” turns to the recent collection of short stories, 101 Detectives by Ivan Vladislavić. Manià reads the collection in terms of the broader debate about writing crime and violence in postapartheid South Africa and proposes an analysis of selected stories in terms of the genre of “anti-detective” fiction. The article demonstrates the ways in which the stories defeat the expectations of the detective formula through the failure of interpretation and the absence of both narrative closure and social reordering. As such, the article proposes a reading of the limits of crime writing more generally, arguing that if crime and violence can be represented in textual form, they are not thereby made decipherable. Extrapolating from the idea of the failure of detection, the article goes on to argue for a reading of the short story collection itself not as a coherent set of clues pointing to a determinate resolution but rather as “a loose affiliation of intensive fragments” (2020: 74), one that resists both containment and coherence.

Sally-Ann Murray’s (2020) contribution “Queerying examples of contemporary South African short fiction” takes as its starting point Axel Nissen’s observation that “maybe short story theory has something to learn from what is known as ‘queer theory’” (2004: 181). Examining expressions of queer sexuality in a range of recent stories by Jane Bennett, Shaun de Waal, Wamuwi Mbao, David Medalie, Sally-Ann Murray, Dolar Vasani, and Makhosazana Xaba, she suggests that these short stories not only draw attention to marginalized sexualities, but also demand a reading of the short story itself as a queer genre. The short story, similar to queer sexualities, persistently disrupts that which is deemed the norm and, as “an outsider, even guerrilla” genre, privileges the margins and the ex-centric. Contemporary anthologies such as Queer Africa (Martin and Xaba, 2013), following the traditional preoccupation of the South African short story with the liminal, consistently undermine heteropatriarchal boundaries and at the same time also transgress the limits of the national, highlighting their authors’ growing participation “in pan-African writing cultures”.

Aghogho Akpome’s (2020) contribution, “Imagining Africa’s futures in two Caine Prize winning stories”, tackles generic boundaries between the short story and the novel by examining the two winning entries of 2008 and 2011, Henrietta Rose-Innes’s “Poison” and NoViolet Bulawayo’s “Hitting Budapest”. Against the background of recent critiques of the prize for its alleged emphasis on “poverty porn”, he examines the alternative ways in which the two authors use the genre of the short story to imagine African futures. The two selected short stories, he suggests, call for critical engagement with the porosity of genre boundaries through their employment of key features of the African novel, engendering a dialogue between the two forms.

In “‘Concrete Fragments’: An Interview with Henrietta Rose-Innes”, Graham Riach comments on Rose-Innes’s writing in its entirety, but focuses on her use of the short story form. Riach holds that it is the intensity of focus and compression that makes the short story her form of choice. Its agility and its ability to allow for both a quick response to events are, for her, the major attractions of this form of writing. The interview also reflects on the role of short story competitions as a means of gaining a foothold into a writing career. The short story form is conceived as a natural fit for a particular kind of writerly perspective, one which comprehends “the world in concrete fragments, singular images and intuitive flashes, rather than in terms of overarching narrative or abstract scheme” (2020a: 113).

Another interview, with Kgauhelo Dube, the director of a Pretoria-based arts consultancy Kajeno Media, reflects on the broader material and institutional contexts of reading and literacy in South Africa through an account of a reading and literature project called “LongStorySHORT” (Sandwith et al., 2020). Inaugurated in 2015, the project is aimed at promoting a vibrant reading culture among black people, in particular, school children, from underprivileged areas. It addresses the structural inequalities which manifest in the absence of libraries in most black rural and township schools, the invisibility of African literature in schools, and a publishing context which is skewed towards writers from the US and the UK. This project ensures exposure to African literature through a combination of live readings by well-known theatre performers and TV presenters which are recorded and packaged into podcasts that can be easily accessed by the public as free downloads. The interview thus reflects on the significance of orality and performance for the genre of the short story as well as on the importance of innovative new digital engagements with the written text.

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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