Emerging writing from four African countries: genres and Englishes, beyond the postcolonial

Abstract

This article presents recent empirical research into emerging literature in English from four African countries. Employing ethnographic research methods to interrogate the current state of emerging writing in English from Cameroon, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya, the research recognises the creative writing medium of ‘short stories’ to capture contemporary concerns of Africans living in the nations noted above. The short stories in this research project are newly sourced and are treated as data per se from which we are able to question the idea of emerging writing in English in these countries being ‘beyond the postcolonial’. In essence, the article presents data which suggest a shift from the classic postcolonial text to new, contemporary texts highlighting fresh departures in theme, genre and use of Englishes. The article demonstrates how the emerging writing captures and represents a sense of the zeitgeist of Cameroon, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya respectively. This article presents distinctive scholarly arguments for the use of interdisciplinary enquiry (ethnographic methods to interrogate the field of literary studies) as well as presenting substantial new empirical data to support the notion that writing in English from former postcolonial countries is less indicative of the classic postcolonial text.

Keywords:

• African writing in English
• postcolonial literature
• World Englishes
• new writing from Africa
• emerging literature in English
• interdisciplinary study
• West African writing in English
• East African writing in English

Notes

1. Wherever ‘writing/literature in English’ is used hereon in it refers specifically to ‘fiction in English(es)of a British postcolonial legacy’. This distinction is made in order to demonstrate the ‘British’ postcolonial legacy and not the French, Lusophone or Dutch legacies, as examples.

2. See Tan et al. for further discussion on the difference between EFL and the Englishes of the ‘Expanding circle’ (specifically 2006, pp. 84–94), as well as Kachru and Nelson for discussion on EFL versus ESL in an Asian context (2006, p. 25).

3. ‘Postcolonialism’ or ‘postcolonial studies’ is understood to span many disciplines (history, cultural studies, ethnography), but for our purposes the term refers to its deployment within literary studies. The term will also be used without the (often deployed) hyphen. Boehmer (2005, p. 3) distinguishes between ‘postcolonial’ as being pre-Second World War and ‘post-colonial’ as being post-war. I shall not deal with ‘post(-)colonial’ notions of literature to the extent that differentiations of such nicety will be required.

4. Although much has been written of the HIV narrative, see Krűger (2004).

5. The 1967 publication by Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'O Petals of Blood is often cited as an early example of the crime writing genre although some scholars question its appearance as a crime fiction per se (Carter 1987).