The Politics of Creation: The Short Story in South Africa and the US.

This study focuses on Blackness and shows how changes in its meaning reflect arguments about the short story as a fictional form. I argue that Blackness, as a socially constructed identity marker and the corresponding discourse designed to reify Whiteness, led to the evolution of an aesthetic consciousness that found critical and creative expression during the Black Power and Black Consciousness movements of the 1960s and 70s. In a process I call the "Politics of Creation," where Blackness and the short story move towards self-definition, we discover that Blackness and the short story reshape the socially constructed groupings designed to "fix" categories of people and genres.