Notice Board

The 21st-century popular fiction genre of Ghana (which I call ‘market fiction’) stands out for its adoption of sensational aesthetics – its dramatic cover images and its supernatural and violent episodes, but also its slapstick comedy and its intertextual associations with other lively cultural forms from its readership’s lived world. One of the subjects the market fiction takes up is slavery. Whereas ‘official’ West African fiction has largely avoided directly depicting slavery, an historical practice that continues to evoke feelings of cultural shame (L. Murphy, Metaphors and the Slave Trade, 2012), Ghana’s market fiction explicitly calls up the disturbing memory of that practice. I argue that books such as Ambrose Sotor’s The Innocent Frog Girl attract a large audience to the taboo subject of slavery—and especially modern-day slavery in the form of child trafficking—by liberally employing local sensational aesthetics