Hyper-compressions: The rise of flash fiction in “post-transitional” South Africa

Blair, P. (2020). Hyper-compressions: The rise of flash fiction in “post-transitional” South Africa', The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 55(1), 38-60. Copyright © 2018. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.This article begins with a survey of flash fiction in “post-transitional” South Africa, which it relates to the nation’s post-apartheid canon of short stories and short-short stories, to the international rise of flash fiction and “sudden fiction”, and to the historical particularities of South Africa’s “post-transition”. It then undertakes close readings of three flash fictions republished in the article, each less than 450 words: Tony Eprile’s “The interpreter for the tribunal” (2007), which evokes the psychological and ethical complexities, and long-term ramifications, of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Michael Cawood Green’s “Music for a new society” (2008), a carjacking story that invokes discourses about violent crime and the “‘new’ South Africa”; and Stacy Hardy’s “Kisula” (2015), which maps the psychogeography of cross-racial sex and transnational identity-formation in an evolving urban environment. The article argues that these exemplary flashes are “hyper-compressions”, in that they compress and develop complex themes with a long literary history and a wide contemporary currency. It therefore contends that flash fiction of South Africa’s post-transition should be recognized as having literary-historical significance, not just as an inherently metonymic form that reflects, and alludes to, a broader literary culture, but as a genre in its own right

Extract from work in progress

This article is an extract from a work in progress

Sull'autostrada

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Boy in a Jute-Sack Hood

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Writing and Methodology : Literary Texts as Ethnographic Datra and Creative Writing as a Means oif Investigation

The chapter will discuss the relation between writing and ethnography from two radically different perspectives. Firstly, writing as method. In academic research, the writing process is often regarded as merely a means of conveying results, and ”good writing” is even met with suspicion. Drawing from my own experience of both literary, journalistic and academic writing I will discuss the interrelations between these three writing practices, with specific focus on creative forms of academic writing and even the deployment of fictional elements in ethnographic research. Examples will be taken from the extensive discussion on the relation between Literature and Anthropology after Anthropology’s “literary turn” in the 1980s, which has implications for many other disciplines, not least Media and Communication studies. I will argue that writing itself constitutes a methodology that is under-researched in the context of Communication for Development. The second part of the chapter will ”turn the tables” and look at literary texts (books, films or other formats) as ethnographic data. Again, primarily founding my argument on my research in South Africa and Argentina, I will claim that literature may hold key information about processes of development and social change that cannot be assessed by other means. I will specifically focus on the notion of the conceptual repertoire (Appadurai) and fiction’s role in the production of collective memory and self-understanding