The Life and Dea(r)th of Ghanaian Popular Fiction

Biography

Theresah Patrine Ennin is an Associate Professor at the Department of English, University of Cape Coast, Ghana, where she teaches and engages in research. Her teaching and research areas include African Literature and Gender. Currently, she is a member of the African Literature Association, the Modern Language Association, and the African Studies Association.  Her academic awards include a 2023 Carnegie Corporation of New York Fellowship. She has been a guest speaker at Universities in Africa and America, including the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, and Iowa State University in the USA, and has published in Journals such as the West Africa Review, Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men, and Research in African Literatures. Her monograph, Men Across Time: Contesting Masculinities in Ghanaian Film and Fiction, was published by NISC 2022 and is available on their website.

The Life and Dea(r)th of Ghanaian Popular Fiction

Ghanaian popular fiction is a genre that is dying. 'Popular', as used here, follows the definition by Stephanie Newell (2000: 154). This demarcates a field of African creativity which is non-elite, unofficial and urban, appealing to a wide local readership with themes that are common and current, often overloaded with moral assessments by the narrator. Ghanaian popular fiction was first produced in bulk in the 1940s and 1950s, by people who had received some formal secondary school education and were working as journalists for the various newspapers. As the genre was mostly audience driven, the texts were produced in response to prevailing issues in the country at the time. The texts had a limited readership, since they could only be distributed within the publisher’s marketing networks. Some of the earliest writers were Mabel Dove-Danquah –who was the only woman in the Gold Coast to publish newspaper articles on a regular basis throughout the 1930s– and J. Benibengor Blay, whose seminal work, Emelia’s Promise (1944) is seen as representative of the kind of fiction being written at the time. In this paper, I discuss the relegation of this genre to a substandard dimension and argue that a return to the study and writing of Ghanaian popular fiction will greatly improve literary production in Ghana.

Free registration here.
 

Theresah's lecture is part of the WOLEC lunchtime lecture series and is funded by the GLOBAL MINDS programme.