Call for papers: Defiance in 21st Century South African Short Stories

Special Issue of The Journal of the Short Story in English 89 (Autumn 2027)

Deadline for abstract submissions:  1 June 2026. Full details here 

From its roots in the oral tradition, the short story genre has continually adapted to societal and cultural factors. Although undergoing mutations which have fuelled the vitality of critical debate and research, “the short story, with its usual focus on a single event or single effect, has remained close to the primacy of the myth according to which myth expresses the inner meaning of things by telling a story” (Chapman xi). Thus, as myths provide “not just meaning, but also significance, and . . . [do] so by placing events in a more or less coherent plot” (Bottici 115), the short story may offer a way of making sense of the discrepancies between discourses and realities, between national narratives and people’s lives.

The short story is “the genre of short fiction that South African literature has most consistently excelled,” according to Craig MacKenzie (176). In the wake of the country’s industrialisation and urbanisation, induced by the late nineteenth-century mineral discoveries, it lost its “close relationship to oral lore, legend, and small-town gossip” to become city-based and increasingly fragmented (178). In response to the institutionalisation of apartheid (racial separation) in 1948, it engaged in social “realism of the kind that valorised witness and protest: art was subjugated to life” (Driver 387). It experienced a literary “renaissance” (MacKenzie 181) in the transition from apartheid to a non-racial South Africa. However, Corinne Sandwith (16) contends that “while earlier short story collections and anthologies marked the hopeful vision of democratic multipli­city of the early 1990s, post-2000 short stories are characterised by increasing generic diversification as well as a range of aesthetic practices, including oral forms, social realism, ‘true fiction,’ temporal disjuncture, fragmentation and liminality, all of which become symptomatic of the thwarted promises of the country’s political transition.”

Indeed, mixed feelings are pervading post-apartheid South Africa. The country faces serious challenges – e.g. high cost of living, unemployment and poverty- and remains one of the most unequal societies in the world as measured by its Gini Index. The 2016 Afrobarometer study showed a decline in people’s support for democracy, from 72% of the respondents in 2011 to 64% of them in 2015, concomitantly to a breakthrough of the authoritarian preference (“sometimes non-democratic is preferable”) rising from 15% to 17% (Lekalake 3). Disturbingly, 6 of 10 South Africans (61%) say “they are willing to forego elections in favour of a non-elected government or leader that could impose law and order, and deliver houses and jobs” (4). More recently, the South African Reconciliation Barometer 2023 revealed that 33% expressed confidence in parliament, 32% in the national government and 33% in the legal system, and that “less than a third of people believe that there have been improvements in key areas including job creation, personal safety and inequality since the transition to democracy” (Lefko-Everett 14, 41).

As Graham K. Riach stresses, “there is a growing body of criticism on the short story as a form usually dealing with American or European texts, yet there are few book-length studies available on the African short story, and fewer still on the short story in South Africa” (11-12)—particularly in the post- 2000s (Sandwith 2).

This special issue of the Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE) will examine the 21st-century South African short story genre through the prism of defiance. According to Nancy Nyquist Potter:

Defiance belongs with a cluster of attitudes and actions that include (but are not identical to) dissent, political (as contrasted with psychoanalytic) resistance, rebellion, and civil disobedience. A defiant action can be an “in your face” one; a defiant attitude usually comes across as openly and deliberately disrespectful (whether or not it means to be). In a refusal to bow to authority, the defiant person has the passion of anger (or indignation or contempt) behind her. Defiance has less force and more limited scope than rebellion, but does not imply the “civilised” quality that dissent, resistance, and civil disobedience do. Those latter forms of protest typically are organised and pre-planned. (32)

How is defiance re-imagined in post-2000 South African writing? Is there a new poetics of defiance emerging in contemporary short stories? How do the shades of defiance, in form and substance, reflect and address the complexities of the country’s cultural, social and political realities?

Works Cited

Cornwell, Gareth, Dirk Klopper, and Craig MacKenzie. The Columbia guide to South African literature in English since 1945. Columbia: Columbia UP, 2010. Print.

Driver, Dorothy. ‘The Fabulous Fifties: Short Fiction in English’, Attwell, David, and Derek Attridge, eds. The Cambridge History of South African Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Print.

Chapman, Michael JF, ed. The New Century of South African Short StoriesJohannesburg: Ad Donker, 2004. Print.

Bottici, Chiara. A Philosophy of Political Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.

Fasselt, Rebecca, and Corinne Sandwith, eds. The Short Story in South Africa: Contemporary Trends and Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2022. Print.

Lefko-Everett, Kate. “South African Reconciliation Barometer Survey: 2023 Report.” Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, 2023. Web. https://www.ijr.org.za/portfolio-items/south-african-reconciliation-barometers-survey-2023-report/

Lekalake, Rorisang. “Support for Democracy in South Africa Declines amid Rising Discontent with Implementation.” Dispatch 71.9 (Feb. 2016). Web. https://afrobarometer.org/sites/default/files/publications/Dispatches/ab_r6_dispatchno71_south_africa_perceptions_of_democracy.pdf

Potter, Nancy Nyquist. The Virtue of Defiance and Psychiatric Engagement. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016. Print.

Riach, Graham K. The Short Story After Apartheid: Thinking with Form in South African Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2023.

Podcast: A Small Good Thing

A series of interviews from Andrea Marzocchi at the University of Surrey. Andrea discusses the short story form with academics, writers, publishers, and anyone who shares a passion for short stories. Previous episodes have included Michael Collins, Tom Conaghan,  Michael Basseler and short story author Heuijung Hur.  In the latest conversation he talks to Andrew Levy, author of  The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story, a foundational text for short story scholars.

Find all episodes here 

Short Fiction in Theory & Practice 15.1 & 2 out now.

This double issue of Short Fiction in Theory and Practice is the second of two issues on the theme of Landscape and Temporality, guest edited by Paul Knowles, Ana Garcia Soriano and Madeleine Sinclair. It features articles drawn from the ENSFR conference held in Manchester, covering authors including Karen Russell, Andres Barba, Daphne du Maurier, Andre Gide and  Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay as well as creative-critical contributions by Ines G. Labarta, Jennifer Cavanagh and A.J. Ashworth. Paul March-Russell’s ‘Anthropocene feminism and the Weird temporalities of landscape’ focuses on work by Zoe Gilbert, Sarah Hall, Daisy Johnson and Lucy Wood. Plus ‘”Guerilla academics”: An interview with Ailsa Cox, Michelle Ryan and Elke D’hoker, founders of the European Network for Short Fiction Research’ by Laura Gallon and the latest book reviews.

 

Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 14.2 Landscape and Temporality in Short Fiction

Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 14.2   contains selected articles from the 2023 ENSFR conference on Landscape and Temporality plus an interview with writer Thomas Morris and a range of book reviews. Guest editors are Paul Knowles, Ana Garcia-Soriano and Madeleine Sinclair. Topics and authors covered include Inuit short stories, Hungarian short stories, short fiction and domestic space, short fiction and dementia, Theophile Gautier, M.R. James, Michel Faber. Plus an iconoclastic new essay from Jon McGregor. And book reviews. Thanks to everyone involved, including the diligent and supportive peer reviewers.

A second volume will follow shortly.

Edge Hill Prize Shortlist Announced

The shortlisted titles for the Edge Hill Prize 2024  for a published collection from Britain and Ireland are as follows:

  • Forgetting is How we Survive by David Frankel (Salt)
  • After the Funeral by Tessa Hadley (Jonathan Cape)
  • Encounters with Everyday Madness by Charlie Hill (Roman Books)
  • Monstrous Longing by Abi Hynes (Dahlia Publishing)
  • Parables, Fables, Nightmares by Malachi McIntosh (The Emma Press)
  • Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea by CD Rose (Melville House Publishing)

A new £1,000 Debut Collection Award will also be presented to one of the shortlisted authors to celebrate the best new voices in short story writing, and a £500 prize will be awarded for the best entry from an Edge Hill University postgraduate creative writing student.

The winner will be announced in February 2025 at an award ceremony in London.  More details of judges and news about the prize are on its website.