141072 KU Alternative Literary Geographies in Short Stories on African Metropoles (2024S)

In this course, we explore the social and cultural dynamics of African metropolises through the stories that contemporary authors tell about them. In a research on literary representations of Nairobi, Kenyan literary scholar Joyce Nyairo (2007) writes: "The approach that I have adopted in this study very deliberately focuses on the agency obtaining in African cities. This is necessary because all too often, talk of African cities is invariably turned into a litany of Africa's boundless chaos. The focus is usually on the decay - both moral and physical - on the marginalised slums and third-rate housing riddled with insecurity, hunger and disease, and on unemployment and infinite poverty, as if Africans have had no other ways of occupying towns. To limit the study of Africa's urban life to these overwhelmingly bleak themes is to completely miss the point of the vivaciousness and opportunity that abounds in these spaces." (127-28)
Young and lesser-known authors in particular, supported by initiatives such as the Caine Prize for African Writing, anthologies and the creation of new literary magazines and digital formats, have created alternative narratives to the alleged chaos of African cities in short stories. They shed light on their heterogeneity without denying the often extreme inequality on the one hand and without feeding one-sided ideas of the African megacity, which are primarily characterised by chaos, poverty and crime, on the other. Against the backdrop of multidisciplinary analyses of the dynamics of African metropolises, we read a selection of short stories focusing on how they address inequality on the one hand and reflect on (new) forms of community, individual and collective agency on the other.