Forms of Mobility: Genre, Language, and Media in African Literary Cultures

Presents alternative categories of fiction through which to examine how contemporary writers have envisaged Africa’s changing literary terrains

Stephanie Bosch Santana analyzes southern African writers’ experimentations with literary form in periodical print and digital media since the mid-twentieth century in order to offer an alternative account of contemporary African imaginations of mobility. Based on an understudied archive of texts in English and Chichewa/Nyanja from Malawi, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, Forms of Mobility: Genre, Language, and Media in African Literary Cultures examines new, noncanonical categories of fiction, including migrant forms, township tales, weekend stories, and digital diaries. These generically, linguistically, and geographically mobile forms map changing ideas of interconnection and belonging. By reading them “in motion,” as they travel across space, time, genre, and language and between publications and platforms, Bosch Santana limns multiple centers of literary influence and relation across southern African and Black diasporas, revealing forms of literary mobility and space making that are occluded by current models of world literature.

STEPHANIE BOSCH SANTANA is an assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.