Paper short abstract:

Recent Ugandan short stories set in urban spaces use the city as a metaphor that normalizes homosexuality as an alternative sexuality for the educated and cosmopolitan Ugandans contrary to their homophobic conservative and transitionally oriented compatriots

Paper long abstract:

The city has always been constructed as a recurrent motif in African literature in the works of foundational African writers. These writers deploy the city as double-edged metaphor. First, the city is portrayed as a metaphor for the diseased polity that corrupts the pristine African society as eloquently articulated in Alan Paton's Cry The Beloved Country. Second, the city allegorises modernity as persuasively presented in Ngugi wa Thiong'o Petals of Blood in which disillusioned city dwellers bring modern ideas such as education to Illmorog. In this paper, I take cognisance of the enduring treatment of the city as a spatial metaphor in African writing to argue that in recent Ugandan short stories the city — infused with modernist and universalist notions of agency, rights and choice — symbolises a space that gay sexuality can be normalised. I read "Pillar of Love," (Lamwaka 2012) "Jambula Tree" (Arac 2007) and "Picture Frame" (Paleo 2013) as texts that set their tales in the city in a manner that empowers the respective protagonists to not only explore their preferred sexuality, but also to suggest that unlike their rural compatriots, the cosmopolitan, educated, middle class Ugandan characters in urban spaces perceive homosexuality as an alternative normal form of sexuality. Therefore, these writers use the short story genre to produce and circulate alternative and standardizing images of homosexuality in the Ugandan public sphere.

Paper short abstract:

There seems to be a recognizable rural/urban dichotomy that attempts to theorize a national identity that initially resisted colonialism in the African short novel. The argument here is that the city has always occupied a special position in literary thought and creativity.

Paper long abstract:

The process of urbanization in Africa has elicited a variety of reactions and interpretation among researchers and casual observers alike. There is a general consensus however in the scholarly literature concerned with African cities on the evidences and representation of features of growth, equal opportunities, employment and severe environmental degradation of our communities. There is also the lack of cheap and affordable housing and the ever increasing cases of criminality and dearth of basic infrastructure in our cities.

In all, this study attempts to analyse the human and institutional changes in contemporary urban African spaces. What is most striking about cities in Africa is their astonishing diversity and heterogeneity. The diversity of cities in Africa is reflected in their dissimilar morphological forms, their distinctive social and demographic compositions and their varying trans-local linkages and connections

We do not pretend to grasp the true or objective reality of contemporary cities in Africa. In our view, this goal is unattainable. Cities in Africa, as elsewhere, are constantly changing, evolving and mutating entities that resist efforts seeking to capture their essence and to categorize them in accordance with pre-established classificatory schemes or to mold them into rigid modes.

Consequently, the aim of this study is to provide a glimpse into the complicated dynamics of urban life in contemporary Africa.

Paper short abstract:

The proposed paper looks at the African city space by analysing the contemporary short story through digital literary platforms.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper seeks to explore the centrality of digital platforms in contemporary African literary production and canonisation. It analyses the influence of such online platforms like literary blogs, online magazines, and journals, arguing that digital publishing platforms have provided the contemporary African writer with an alternative literary avenue to print publications. Some of these outfits include Jalada, Story Moja, Anakara and Chimurenga online magazines and publishers among others. I take note of the significance of the city space as a physical setting for these literary organisations as well as a central theme in the narratives told through these platforms. This article pays special focus on Jalada and Ankara online publications to examine how digital literary platforms have been transformed into an avenue for providing alternative literary structures for contemporary writers. I focus on the city space in these contemporary short stories by analysing the literary outputs from both Jalada and Ankara publishers, arguing that online publications allow for experimentation with language, space, form and style, while further promoting the concept of multimodalities in literary production by the presentation of literature not only in print but in audio, video, drawings, paintings and photographs. This paper aims to argue that the centrality of digital publishing alternatives in contemporary African literature has significantly contributed in pushing the boundaries of literature, especially the short story genre, beyond the definitions set out by major institutions of canon formation.

Paper short abstract:

African short stories in the recent years have often generated a reading site that references the tension between the city and rural settings.

Paper long abstract:

African short stories in recent years have often generated a reading site that references the tension between the city and rural settings. The tension is palpably illustrated in some selected short stories in Chinua Achebe and C.L. Innes (Eds.) anthology, African Short Stories(1985). The varied stories embedded in the anthology are drawn from the West, East, North and South African sub-regions. Thematically, the stories are inward-looking, showing the entire Africa as being enmeshed in value(s) contradiction. While the rural dwellers continually contend with inherent social lack whose aftermath derives from dwindling economies, absence of the basic infrastructure, city dwellers constantly face the problems of congestion, loss of identity and cultural decay. The paper's overarching focus is on this double-edged socio-cultural relationship of lack and anonymity which foregrounds the contradiction imbedded in the narratives of African short stories. The narratives in the anthology are concerned with two intents: to juxtapose the signification of alluring cultural ambience of the rural dwelling in contradiction with the rising frustration emanating from the decadence as a corollary of city dwelling.

Paper short abstract:

This paper seeks to investigate how Lagos as a social, cultural and economic space has evolved in the imagination of Nigerian short story writers from a romanticized and desirable environment to a demonized destination.

Paper long abstract:

The relocation of the site of fictional recreation from the rural and traditional society to the modern and urban space has been a major development in Nigerian writing. This has led to privileging the metropolitan condition, facilitating the projection of a national identity in postcolonial Nigerian fiction in the process. But there have not been many efforts at exploring the urban space in Nigerian short fiction.

As an intervention in this regard, this paper seeks to investigate how Lagos as a social, cultural and economic space has evolved in the imagination of Nigerian short story writers from a romanticized and desirable environment to a demonized destination. The paper will explore representations of Lagos and its inhabitants in Cyprian Ekwensi's Restless City and Christmas Gold with Other Stories and Karen King- Aribisala's Our Wife and Other Stories, works by a Nigerian and a non-Nigerian respectively-- which were published about five decades apart-- to demonstrate how authorial vision and the changing fortunes of Nigeria's economic capital have collaborated in redefining her in Nigerian short fiction.