Introduction: Flash Fiction and New Media Spaces

Consistent with statistics in what is conventionally tagged “Sub-Saharan” Africa, the expansion of internet access in Ghana has been dramatic since the turn of the millennium. This remarkable increase in access has consequently revolutionized modes of African cultural production, particularly in urban Ghana. The prevalent nature of digital technology has in turn allowed both professional and amateur creative writers to harness new forms of imaginative expression via online media platforms. One burgeoning avenue for such endeavors is flash fiction in online spaces where these writers tend to explore issues related to themes that challenge orthodox cultural norms. They treat such themes in order to provide alternative perspectives to established socio-cultural values fostered by older forms of technology related to orality and print in Ghana. The internet allows this new breed of young writers to use these digitally based genres to extend the literary engagement with contemporaneous sociocultural issues. The creative efforts of these writers thus open up research possibilities to ascertain how this emerging genre of writing differs from and complements existing imaginative works. But, perhaps more critically, there are also attempts to understand the ways in which this type of writing stands out as a unique field of creativity.

While Ghanaian popular culture has been a subject of study for the past two decades, thanks to the excellent work of researchers such as Joseph Oduro-Frimpong, Stephanie Newell, and Esther de Bruijn, Africanist scholarship has yet to examine the exciting work being done by the mainly young, amateur writers using digital technology in Ghana, even though these writers are prolific. Flash fiction is a particularly accessible genre for these writers because of its fluid form, which on the surface appears restrictive due to its brevity but actually allows for an exploration of a variety of themes through its unique deployment of literary elements such as plot, theme, and characterization. Despite its supposed stylistic constraints, the iconoclasm of flash fiction allows for a distinctive way of addressing a wide spectrum of unexplored and contentious meanings and ideas. In “The Remarkable Reinvention of Very Short Fiction,” Robert Shapard defines the form as “very short fiction” that is “ten times shorter than a traditional story,” even though he admits that “numbers don't tell us everything.”