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

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.