“An odd form of love”: Women Writing Friendship in African Short Fiction

Abstract

This thesis contributes to the growing body of scholarship on African women’s writing. It focuses on representations of friendship in selected short fiction by African women written in English. While conversations around love and intimacy have increased in recent years, friendship in African women’s writing is seldom a sustained area of study. I argue that friendship offers rich ground for expanding emerging scholarship on representations of love and intimacy in African women’s writing. I identify three critical areas of friendship in the short fiction I examine in this thesis: feminist friendship, queer friendship, and friendship with the more-than-human world. These three areas, historically marginalized in scholarship on African writing, as well as in African fiction itself, have found a home in short fiction from the continent, especially as the short story has burgeoned post-2000. Using feminist, queer, and ecocritical theory, I examine the friendships in the short fiction selected for this thesis. In my examination of friendship, I first turn to feminist depictions of friendship in selected South African women’s short fiction. I argue that friendship plays a central role in forming personal and political consciousnesses that allow women to position themselves against violent, racist, and sexist realities. In so doing, I map the possibilities and limitations friendship offers the female characters in these texts. I then turn to selected Ugandan and Kenyan representations of queer friendship. I demonstrate that friendship allows the characters in these texts to be alternatively seen or unseen in contexts that are often violent, racist, and homophobic. Finally, I show that depictions of friendship with the more-than-human world are a key aspect of African women’s writing from the continent and the diaspora. I analyse depictions of friendship between human and nonhuman subjects in the context of the extreme violence of the Anthropocene. In ending with this expanded conception of friendship, I emphasise friendship’s role in the depiction of dying worlds and stress its potential for world-making.