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| Title: | (Un)solving global challenges: African short stories, literary awards and the question of audience |
| Author: | Edwin, Shirin |
| Year: | 2016 |
| Periodical: | Journal of African Cultural Studies (ISSN 1369-6815) |
| Volume: | 28 |
| Issue: | 3 |
| Pages: | 359-371 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Africa |
| Subjects: | short stories literary prizes |
| External link: | https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2016.1146575 |
| Abstract: | 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', Osondus' '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. The author locates this critique in examples of refusals of assistance, roundabout comments and misconstruals of meaning as the ways in which the solutions are deferred. He calls 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, the author argues, thus develop a supplementary critique. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract] |
