The Cape Cod Bicycle War: : and Other Stories
- Submitting institution
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University of Bristol
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 200945570
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Ohio University Press
- ISBN
- 9780821424162
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- March
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The Cape Cod Bicycle War emerges from Kahora’s ongoing interest in definitions and depictions of youth in sub-Saharan Africa and in the contradictions between the demographic’s high visibility in popular culture/mainstream media and their absence from mainstream political debates and spaces. Kahora deploys extensive historical and media research into the political situation in Kenya following the 2007 elections, the role of youth in the violence arising out of the contested polls, and contemporary corruption and religious extremism, to reflect on what it means to be caught in this bind between visibility and powerlessness in different societal settings.
The collection also has a critical and theoretical framework. It seeks to subvert earlier but still influential realistic tropes of Kenyan post-independence fiction by writers such as Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Meja Mwangi. Using what James Wood has pejoratively called ‘hysterical realism’, Kahora places his research on the short story form in conversation with Achille Mbembe’s idea of ‘entanglement’ in the postcolony to re-invent youthful characters who find meaning in failure in a Kenya that is a ‘product of several cultures, heritages, and traditions…to the point where something has emerged that has the look of ‘custom’ without being reducible to it, and partakes of “modernity” without being wholly included in it’.
The stories set outside Kenya are based on Kahora’s research into the complexities of post-colonial diaspora, focusing on characters who find themselves in the liminal space of having ‘left’ the country while still ‘remaining’ in it. Several of the stories were written through creative writing research residencies and collaborations at Rhodes University, South Africa, Iwalewa House, Bayreuth University, Germany, and Northumbria University, U.K, where Kahora gave talks and lectures reflecting on and interrogating how narrative voice and ideology can be reconciled in short fiction, and on creative writing teaching pedagogies.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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