Institutional consecration and recognition

Brown (2010) ties canonical valuation to the perception that literary texts have merit. Davis (2012) stresses that a literary text functions differently depending on the social, artistic and economic context. As a construct of social identity, the text achieves what Davis, (2012:63)

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regards as “marker of symbolic capital” (equivalent of Guillory’s (1993) “cultural capital,”) that functions as a sign of shared socio-historical and cultural tradition. Davis and Guillory concur that a literary text with wide dissemination cedes consecration in academe as much as in socio-cultural context. Similarly, Brown (2010:539) avers that a literary text achieves canonical reception by gaining scholarly attention.

Recognition by scholars is the pressure point for opening the pedagogical canon because it embodies and engenders critical esteem. Notice by scholars amounts to an official testament to qualify. Besides allowing entry, scholarly notice is presumed to play a role in keeping works and authors in the canon corral.

For Brown, acceptance or non-acceptance of all literary texts into the canon is a condition of scholarly attitudinal practice. This view is shared by Mapara, who, in an interview with the researcher, posits that the exclusion of the short fictional genre is not entirely consequent upon the Rhodesia Literature Bureau’s indeterminacy. He argues that it has much to do with constellation of universities as learning institutions mandated to institute pedagogic course outlines. Mapara argues that the Rhodesia Literature Bureau “was set up to develop literature of least ideological resistance. It does not say novel. Its reference is to literature.” To further exonerate the Bureau from accusation of narrowed short story focus Mapara adds:

As far back as 1959, the first Shona poetry anthology was published, that is three years after the first Shona novel, Feso (Solomon Mutswairo). The first play was to come in 1969, and the first short story anthologies Ndakatongwa Nenyika Mbiri and Mvengemvenge were to come later in 1976 and all were published by Mambo Press [under the auspices of the Bureau].

Mapara’s contention is that although the Rhodesia Literature Bureau maintained a dubious role in the production of national literature it may not be held responsible for all of the pitfalls of Zimbabwean national literature. He maintains that institutional practices and academics’ curricular tastes imbue the liminal condition of the short story:

So the exclusion of the short story from the Zimbabwean literary canon to me has to do more with the education curriculum that had selectors of literary set texts who ignored the short story. It was recently that short stories in Shona have been prescribed at both O and A level, I think starting in the 1990s with Ndakatongwa Nenyika Mbiri and later Masimba.

Muwati also accedes to the view that the Zimbabwean literary canon is sanctioned by the community of the academe. Responding in an interview Muwati he says:

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The curriculum in universities is to a large extent the prerogative of the academics. If the academic concerned has a skewed and toxic orientation then the quality of change leaves a lot to be desired.

Muwati reiterates what Chiwome and Mguni (2012) echo in postulating that certain literary works get the support of educational institution through their prescription for study in schools, colleges and universities, while others do not. They postulate that the study of African literature, therefore, involves analysing institutionalised ways of looking at reality. For them, learning institutions present literary canon as a site of struggle where recycled colonial images of domination are reproduced.

Through literature reality can be reorganised to suit the interest of those in power. In the context of the former colony like Zimbabwe, literature can be viewed as a site of struggle… Writers can either represent powers that oppress the masses or write from below in order to bring the people living in the margins closer to the centre, (Chiwome and Mguni, 2012:3).

One discerns from Chiwome and Mguni that writers concentrate on writing novels because the school and universities as the consecrating centres, not only prioritise the novel but prescribes it ahead of the short story. However, it is ironic that writers prefer not to “write from below,” to bring grassroots genres close to the centre. If they did they could have preferred the inferior short fiction in order to bring its marginality “closer to the centre.”

Lauter (1983) considers professionalisation of the teaching of literature as well as development of literary theories as instrumental factors influencing institutional recognition of certain texts over others. He holds that professional specialisation contributes to the institutionalisation of academic reading choices. What had been the function of the museum, art galleries, publishing houses, literary clubs and magazines has become the purview of the classroom at the discretion of the professors. The lecturers determine the criteria for selecting texts for study. Texts exist within a given canon because they were placed there through “institutional practices, cultural practices and the human need for division and categorisation” (Davis, 2012:72).

Muwati, a professor domiciled in UZ department of African Languages and Literature, responded in an interview that the idea of literary canon in African languages literature is not

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a case of form or genre preferment. The concern over difference or sameness of form is subsidiary to articulation of socio-historical and cultural matters. Fiction is studied generically. The course that covers the generality of fictional discourses is simply called ‘The Novel’ and is offered to first and third year undergraduates. A short story is integrated and analysed in terms of the novel. Whether the two are similar or different in terms of form is not a matter of concern. The department offers no course for creative writing, unlike in English Department. Muwati comments:

What is vital is not the genre or medium. Rather, it is the sensibility and aesthetic commitment and orientation of the writer. Masimba, for example, advances a thoroughly westernised and divisive sensibility on gender or male-female relations. He observes that African consciousness, the deepest felt definition of Africanness, precludes Western literary values of genresization and massification of art. Rather, modern African literature, according to Muwati, should celebrate:

…sensibility of the writer, potential for consciousness building, potential for re- Africanisation of consciousness as well as possibilities for understanding the economic, social and political dynamics in the nation.

The UZ approach to fiction permeates almost all local universities. For instance, a Midlands State University lecturer acknowledges the role of professors and fellow lecturers in shaping the curriculum course. He argues that the concerned lecturer decides what to study in consultation with ZIMCHE. He says he considers the content over form to determine a course of study.

Rather than celebrate the number of publications there is critical need to concentrate on quality as determined by Zimbabwe’s lived and liveable experiences. … Celebrating the upsurge of publications without an intense interest in content may be self-defeating because the culture and agenda carried by some short stories may not be uniquely African.

This importation is consequent upon theoretical foundations the departments of African languages literature extol to support their national literary canon. The Afrocentric theoretical foundation upon which African languages literature is predicated cherishes African consciousness as a construct for firm socio-historical and cultural persuasions and articulation of African intellectual and symbolic cohesive identity, (Nobles 2015). For Nobles consciousness is relative to African people’s literature:

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(Consciousness is), in effect, a construct that represents the ability of human beings to know, perceive, understand and be aware of self in relation to self and all else… it allows African people to reflect, respond, project and create from, before and beyond the time of one’s experience. Consciousness allows for the retention of [African] sensibilities that interpret and give meaning to contemporary experiences, (Nobles: 2015:45-6).

Thus, as African cultural continuity, consciousness dispels notions of form in literature. The concept of ‘form’ becomes ‘theory’ only in Eurocentric formalist literary criticism which mainstream Afrocentricity frowns at. As such, conception of African fiction in terms of ‘form’ would betray the view that Afrocentricity is a movement away from the representation of the literary object as Kantian aesthetic pleasure value centred. It destroys the necessity of an African-centred theory for finding an answer to the question of the definition of African literature. The aesthetics of sameness and/ or difference between the novel and short story forms suggests an inclination towards mechanical formalist paradigms of Western aestheticism.

Be that as it may, the complex location of the short story within indigenous African languages literature transcends the mere question of ‘form.’ The negative literary provenance of the short story canon presages power of the legitimating institutional context. It reveals the power dynamics resident in the rise of professoriate and institutionalism. As Lauter (1983:445) adjudges, Black intellectuals face a peculiar “colour line [prejudice] that professionalism did nothing to dispel. The short story abjection chronicles how “institutionalisation of literature as an academically acceptable discipline” was influenced by “the rise of professoriate as a result of the professionalisation of learning” (D’hean 2011:26). The proliferation of the novel in innumerable excess of short creative writing, (during the pre-colonial and post-independence transitional phase, 1956 and 1990) reproduced a critical scenario in which the value of the short story disappeared among these piles as “hidden texts” due to the disabling and invisible context of an avalanche of indigenous African languages literature (Ede, 2013:180). Ede conceptualises invisibility as,

…disarticulating local condition of production or dissemination – trans-historical, technical editorial, technological, cultural, institutional, genre-specific conceptual and paradigmatic which contributes to … marginalisation of the African text as hidden, (ibid: 180).

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For Ede, invisibility re-inscribes the peripheral short story as symbolising the Western “aesthetic economy of waste” (ibid: 181) in which the plenitude of novel reproduces a parasitical canonical centre that colonises the short story abjection as normal. The opportunistic novel canon

…salvages material of readable quality for its own self-constitution. This necessitates the complete excretion of other works of greater merit but which do not conform to the centre’s ideological requirements, (ibid: 181).

The regression in standards is further aggravated when an institution, as the historically subordinating centre, consecrates a novel whose only merit might be its subject-matter rather than literary quality. The lapse reveals a deplorable form of neurosis in which African socio- historical processes continue to be analysed as isolated stereotypical events in the lives of the unanchored people.

Literary texts have acceded to canonical ascendancy due to periodisation of literary studies. Academic institutions determine their literary canon by allotting texts into conventional histographic organisation of ‘periods’ and ‘themes.’ A respondent insinuates:

Usually it is themes as well as a mix of different periods when texts were published. At times being new is another criterion that is used to determine which book to include among prescribed texts.

The conventional determinants; ‘period’ as historical framework and ‘theme’ as cultural configuration of African literature validates Veit-Wild’s (1993) classification of Zimbabwean literature into threesome generational tiers. Veit-Wild emphasises the distinction between these generations as structurally based on historical periods and thematic patterns each generation exhibited during the course of Zimbabwean history.

…while the first generation believed in social transformation through education and the acquisition of European values, the second generation is basically a generation of cynics while the third generation is liberal and therefore closer to the second in terms of detachment from the African nationalism, (Veit-Wild, 1992:12).

According to Lauter (1983:452) “periodisation of art” has become the “convenient pigeonhole in which to place works in syllabi”. Lauter fosters that historiographic factors of period and theme “shape significantly the ways in which we think about culture emphasizing works that fit a given framework and obscuring those which did not,” (ibid: 445). The

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concern for period and theme override the concern for form. Taken in this light, whether fiction is elaborate or brief does not count, hence the novel overwrites short fiction. The text is understood in terms of thematic concerns rather than in terms of compositional techniques.

The exclusion of short story is further heightened by the division of national literature along language units and theoretical foregrounding. The departmentalisation of Zimbabwean literature into African/ indigenous languages languages literature, on one hand, and English language literature on the other, meant Zimbabwean literature had to be perceived as two appositional fronts. Black professors of literature are separated into their own professional departments so much that the literary canons they charter showcases their respective departments. Critics are products of the departments or faculty units to which they are affiliates. Institutional systems ratify the choice of texts to study. The system is influenced by departmental background and critical position that the academics find persuasive. Davis (2012:72) inscribes:

Critics write within a humanist institution, the university, where truth and authority are privileged over instability and subjectivity. Each viewpoint is dependent on a system of thinking which is privileged by the institution and supported by other practitioners of that system of thinking.

In Anglophone departments where English, French or Portuguese is medium of instruction, African literature parrots European literature that the academics were and still are exposed to. The acquired western lenses of understanding literature are immediately imported into African literature. According to the Wikipedia, free online encyclopaedia, the pioneer University of Zimbabwe, formerly the University of Rhodesia was established in 1952 in special relationship with the University of London, the British establishment. In a bid to preserve relations with imperialist hegemony, the first black university adopted the syllabi of the British establishment. Ngugi (1999) acknowledges the corrupting influence of the British literary hegemony on universities of its creation. He observes that the pioneering African writers and critics, who, more often than not, are lecturers, had recuperated out of the British model of university education they received. They are products of English Departments of literature and their initial aspirations for literature were instigated by admiring the model they read. Alluding to the subtly corrosive nature of British colonial education Okunoye posits:

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The colonial educational system did not take the cultural and peculiar situation of their subjects into consideration. It discountenanced their needs and effectively disseminated the European literary heritage and values by ensuring … that the canon of European literature was adopted within (African) education system, (Okunoye, 2004:165).

Thus colonial education projects a quasi-liberal outlook that does not make overt attempts at invading the African cultural life “beyond the sphere of formal interaction that the school environment and activities of allied agencies like the British Council provided” (ibid: 166). However, its manifestation is a more refined form of indebtedness whereby the Western cultural and aesthetic tastes are recommended as specimen for idyllic literary canon. The commissioning of African literature immediately after independence owed considerable indebtedness to Eurocentric models. Critics within English departments of Zimbabwean literature emphasize the “aesthetic or formal qualities of literature as belles lettres (most beautiful, most artistic or imaginative) above whatever historical interests,” (Lauter, 1983:446). Their analysis of African literature emphasise both form and content, (theme) to appreciate aesthetic values of the text. The African novel is studied as unique literary type that embodies characteristics peculiarly its own. Themes embodied are explored in terms of cultural identity, language and usefulness of ‘black’ aesthetics. Williams in Wicombe (2001:159) remarks that the material aspect of the production of a creative text links the pragmatics of transmission with form:

For a social theory of literature, the problem of form is a problem of the relations between social modes and individual projects. For a social and historical theory based on the materiality of language and the related materiality of cultural production, it is a problem of the description of variable relations within specific material practices. Thus a social theory can show that form is inevitably a relationship.

This idea of African literature in Anglophone departments inclines towards representing literary ‘form’ as aesthetically value laden, a position radical Afrocentric literary critics do not content with. Left-wing Africanists, such as Chinweizu, Ngugi, Achebe and Chiwome contend that African literature can only be conceived in terms of its content, that is, its socio- historical and cultural appeal, which, of necessity, must leave out the old-age pleasure, sublime and beauty effects of Kantian aesthetic value in literature (Wenzel, 2005).

Accordingly, the short story, a formulaic variant of narrative, is accepted as a genre of lower status to the novel, the treasure-house of fiction. The marginal recognition of short fiction

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reflects an underlying hierarchical structure permeating dominant imperialist pedagogies of Anglophonic African literature. The subordination of the genre recycles cultural lowliness and dependence that African literature is subjected to as long as English, French or Portuguese literatures are “figured as the metropolitan model,” (Glesener, 2013). The local literary politics in the production of a nation-bound canon at the prelude of independence, therefore, became an ideological deportment in which the academe set objective standards by which the presumed mundane or works of lesser literary value would be separate from the standard masterpieces. Thus, in a bid to present a sustained critique of the modern African writing with a “view to expose its immersion in European traditions” the intellectual community failed to scrutinise their literature curriculum and the effect of institutionalisation of teaching of literature. As a result, the short story was marginalised as patronised craft of the glamorous Europhile novel.

In as much as literature is a strong force for socio-cultural dynamism, its canon might become a centrally organised conspiracy to perpetuate the dominant institutions’ cultural tastes, especially if the lines of demarcation are not enunciated at the level of effect. The present short story debate reflects the latest trends in Zimbabwean literary studies in which institutionalised cultures are at the heart of pedagogical and canonical practices. Within the academy, canon is limited to the academics anxiety for influence that subsists within the “boundaries of held current institutional beliefs and criticism,” (Reaves and Gibson, 2013:9). In the same way as the colonial literature canonised the novel ahead of short story, the criteria for determining a new literary canon within academe of the newly independent state have become canonical too. The entire process has become profoundly circular. The subordinate relationship of the West as centre and Africa as the periphery recreates the Africa novel as core and the short story as marginal within an interplay of interests that sustains the circle. Altieri (1983:40) argues that, “Those whose specific beliefs place them in many respects within the competing circles may still share wider principles.” Literary canonical values are, therefore sectarian, revealing deep affiliations with more enduring cultural values. Kermode suggests that literary canon is a function and valuable feature of institutionalised education that exposes a range of idealised attitudes. Kermode’s conclusion reverberates with Brown’s assertion of literary canon as the prerogative of intellectuals in academe, either as individuals or groups. For Brown (2010:540) intellectuals within a faculty of an academic unit represent

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a “multi-dimensional lattice work of symbolic value” for theorising institutional and cultural superstructures of resident canon. Regardless of its estimated socio-historical and cultural