“How might I act if I were to imagine myself as a being not of this world but as world-forming?”
Claire Colebrook
Zoë Wicomb’s essay “South African Short Fiction and Orality” opens with the statement: “Bigger is better, and so it is always in relation to that prosperous, potbellied and commodious form, the novel, that its poor relation, the short story is discussed” (157). In the essay, she discusses how orality relates to matters of form and argues against the critical tradition in South African culture that reproduces “the hierarchical relationship between the short story and the novel” in terms of race, namely “the white giants with their linguistic and cultural capital write novels, while black writers produce short fiction” (157). She points to the link between this perceived hierarchical relationship and the idea “that the short story is the natural postcolonial form to succeed a black tradition of oral story-telling” (157). To “unhitch the short story from black writing” (157),...