Flash Fiction Ghana, African Electronic Literature, and Imagining Social Communities

Abstract

Even though social communities have been theorized upon and researched into in African literature to various ends, not much has been done in terms of African digital literature. This article speaks to the silence by considering the ways in which social communities are imagined in African digital literature, using short stories from the Ghanaian website Flash Fiction Ghana as basis. I argue that digital technology allows amateur authors to construct, imagine, and critique social relationships in ways that simultaneously signal a convergence with and a departure from traditional notions of social communities in Ghanaian – and for that matter African – literature. The addition of comment sections on such stories again leads to forms of engagement that place author and audience in complex relationships.