Literariness and genre mobility: journalistic features in the short stories by Herbert Dhlomo

Working with an extended notion of ‘literariness’, my paper seeks to explore the different ways in which journalism affects the tone and mode of H.I.E. Dhlomo’s prose fiction. Four short stories have been selected to discuss this instance of genre mobility, namely ‘An Experiment in Colour’, ‘Farmer and Servant’, ‘Drought’, and ‘The Barren Woman’. From a formal point of view, these texts are written according to a factual narrative style that could be properly defined as ‘literary journalism’. The thematic correspondence between Dhlomo’s articles and short narratives, however, represents the most visible element of the influence of journalism on his prose fiction. Thus, the lack of literary criticism about Dhlomo’s short stories is surprisingly supplied by the writer’s own articles, which also serve as a commentary on his own fictional texts. In such an intersection of the fictional with the factual lies both the literary and the political significance of H.I.E. Dhlomo’s writing.