Forms of Affiliation: Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Globalism in Southern African Literary Media

Abstract

Forms of Affiliation maps new literary geographies that cut across national, postcolonial, local, and global frameworks. Focusing on fiction from the 1950s to the present-day from South Africa, Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, it demonstrates how writers from these nations have developed new genres of fiction in popular media to imagine changing modes of interconnection across space. Popular media—including newspapers, magazines, and their digital iterations—are vital literary outlets in southern Africa and often the only means for underrepresented populations to find a voice in public discourse. Crucially, many of the genres in these publications do not fit neatly into European literary categories. They also envision Africanness and blackness within a variety of overlapping spatial scales, from the township to the diaspora, thus challenging the common conception of southern African literatures as tied primarily to nationalist projects. Through the analysis and translation of hundreds of stories from publications such as African Parade, Africa!, the Malawi News, and the Chimurenga Chronic, I identify four generic categories of southern African fiction: “migrant forms,” “township tales,” “newspaper short stories,” and “literary time-machines.” Across its chapters, Forms of Affiliation shows how these genres make visible combinations of form, meaning, and geography that are obscured by traditional literary categories.