Burying the Dead: The Postcolonial Strategies of Achebe and Naipaul (original) (raw)
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Globalization and Cultural Identity in the Writings of Chinua Achebe and V. S. Naipaul
Power of Knowledge: UGC Approved Multilingual Research Journal, ISSN No 2320- 4494 , 2018
This paper aims to discuss the theme of globalization and its impact on the cultural identity as a brief study of the writings of Chinua Achebe and V. S. Naipaul in the novels; Things Fall Apart and Half A Life. Globalization has a great impact on cultures and civilizations all over the world. It can be considered as a new mask of colonization and neo-colonization. It has its advantages for the west and the rest and its disadvantages for the rest only. It brings out a lot of problems for the third world. One of the main problems is related to the cultures of many communities. Therefore the cultural identity of these communities finds itself in a state of chaos. This paper will shed light on the consequences of globalization as an ideology of imperialism and as a source of imposing the new forms and orders on the other's culture and life in general. The questions of this paper are; which culture and which order will be made globalised in this process of globalization? Are we aware of losing our own indigenous culture in this process? And how these two writers react to this process in the writings? And what is the relationship between globalization and colonization from a postcolonial perspective?
Things Fall Apart and Chinua Achebe's Postcolonial Discourse
International Journal on Studies in English Language and Literature (IJSELL), 2018
Chinua Achebe, the contemporary Nigerian novelist, is considered as one of the prominent figures in African anti-colonial literature. What makes his works specific is the way he approaches the issues of colonization of Africa in an objective manner and through an innovative language which aims at providing a pathology; a pathological reading meant to draw on the pre-colonial and colonial history without any presumptions so as to present the readers with possible alternative African discourses in future. His first novel Things Fall Apart can be taken as the best representative of such a penchant in Achebe. The present study seeks to approach Things Fall apart by reflecting on those discursive features which have provided the ground for constructing such a pathological reading and an alternative to the colonial discourse. To this end, some key terms introduced by Homi Bhabha and Mikhail Bakhtin such as ‘hybridity’, ‘otherness’ and ‘polyphony’, constitute the cornerstone of this study. Presumably, such an innovative reading of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is to lead to a better understanding of his discourse and the efforts made by him to help the African readers figure out how to piece together what once fell apart; what they can rely on for building an independent future in the so-called postcolonial era.
Postcolonial adaptation and appropriation in Chinua Achebe
International Journal of English and Literature, 2015
Post colonialism is generally taken to be a term of repression and resistance. But post colonialism need not necessarily connote a violent reaction of the dominating and the dominated against each other. In fact more than repression and regression, cultural and political adaptation and appropriation seem to have been at work in this process. Several postcolonial theorists have condoned the view that colonialism and post colonialism are a process of cultural interchange and intermixture. There is a certain amount of glorification and mutual desire involved in this process. The dialectics of desire has been dealt with at length by postcolonial theorists like Fanon who have pinned it onto a sense of shortcoming within the colonized. Several nationalist leaders and thinkers like Mohandas Karamch and Gandhi and Chinua Achebe have proved with their lives the necessity of adaptation before one could develop one's own resistance. Chinua Achebe broadly marked as a resistant writer has however not been unaware of the working of cultural exchange through adaptation which he has subtly indicated in his novels, and this paper attempts to study such an angle of postcolonial theory in Achebe's novels.
Chinua Achebe's Postcolony: A Literary Anthropology of Postcolonial Decadence
Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute, 2022
This essay is part of responses on the occassion of the 25th annivesary of Achille Mbembe's 1992 essay "Provisional Notes on the Postcolony." Here, I draw on Chinua Achebe’s fiction of the postcolony in two novels, No Longer At Ease and A Man of the People, to discuss the value of the African literary archive for an anthropological interest in elites and postcolonial decay. This African literary archive has contributed enormously to Mbembe’s critique of the postcolony. I argue that, in contrast to anthropologists of the late colonial and early postcolonial moment, African writers like Achebe mobilised fiction as a powerful form of critique to address early signs of postcolonial despair and disillusionment in Africa.
Voice of voiceless:Chinua achebe and Post-colonialism
Agreat dealof the history of international relations is characterized by the aggressiveassays of one community to subjugate another. ‘Colonialism’, according to Oxford English Dictionary, comes from the Roman word ‘colonio’ meaning ‘farm’ or ‘settlement’. Thus, ‘colonialism’ is a settlement in a new country. Colonialism was not an alikeprocess in diverseparts of the world, but universally, new comerslocked the original inhabitantsinto the most traumatic and complex of relationships in human history. The process of ‘creating a refined community’ as declared by the white colonizers, in the new land, necessarily meant unforming or reforming the communities that existed already. This gave birtha wide range of exercises
The Fall of National Identity in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart
This article examines Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart within a postcolonial discourse. While the majority of postcolonial critiques argue over indigenous identity, this study explores the deterioration of national identity in Things Fall Apart. Such deterioration is brought about by the spiritual and tentative defeat inherent in the failure of the protagonist, Okonkwo, to face the colonial whites. Ultimately, the protagonist's failure leads to a tragic death. In the novel's context, Achebe exhorts the fall of national identity and its pathetic aftermath. The deterioration in national identity symbolically correlates to the protagonist's personal irresolute experience which is at first physically powerful but in the end spiritually weak. The focus of this article is a textual analysis of Achebe's Things Fall Apart, applying postcolonial theoretical concepts, especially aboriginality, hegemony, subaltern and identity. These concepts facilitate a smouldering conceptualisation of national identity as it is exterminated in the novel. Thus, the these terms will be cited mainly with reference to Bill Ashcroft, Gayatri Spivak, and Laura Chrisman's postcolonial critiques.
Reading Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart from the Postcolonial Perspective
Various factors lead Achebe to write Things Fall Apart, which has acquired the status of a classic; among them, the most noteworthy one is his indignation at European representations of Africans in fiction. One such European representation of Africans in fiction was Joyce Cary's novel Mr. Johnson which depicts exterior picture of Africa. Hence, Things Fall Apart is a counter discourse and the project Achebe adopts in it explains his position based on the interiority of original local contexts. Achebe has declared that he wrote Things Fall Apart "in order to reassert African identity and as part of the growth of Nigerian nationalism" (O'Reilly 2001: p. 61). The present study intends to analyze Things Fall Apart from the perspective of the various issues of a postcolonial text.
Lapis Lazuli, 2024
Literary studies is increasingly abandoning the methods of 'theory' and ideology-critique in favour of a disposition broadly identified as "post-critique". While the problems identified with literary studies in this disposition is valuable, the paper argues, some of its assumptions prove to be problematic in reading of a postcolonial text. Joining issue with Rita Felski's 2017 book, Critique and Postcritique, this paper seeks to identify the problematic of the post-critical turn in the reading of Postcolonial novels. Using theories of Postcolonialism and those of the novel form, this paper revisits Chinua Achebe's now-classic novel, Things Fall Apart (1958) to shed light on the inadequacy of postcritique in a justifiable reading which the novel demands. The narrative complexity of the novel form and the inherent political dialogic of a postcolonial text, the paper argues, demand a critical reading practice which is different from the propositions of both ideology-critique as well as postcritique.
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart : A Critique of Post-Colonial Discourse
All African writings, specially novels, are at once literary pieces, a social protest and a medium of political reassertion. The African writings portray the post-colonial African reality in all its varied colours and texture. Writers like Chinua Achebe, in their works, have delineated the characters of their fictional heroes as leaders of the struggle against colonial and neocolonial forces stubbornly obstructing the process of social regeneration and political nativization. Literature occurs under the glow of certain socio-phychological impacts upon the author. Chinua Achebe confirms the validity of this observation most forcefully in the sense that his novels faithfully mirrors the post-colonial colours that shadow the hopes and aspirations of the community that he belongs to. The present paper attempts a critique of post-colonial discourse of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. The cross-currents that enrich the texture of the novel consists of the emergence of neo-colonialism along with the lingering shadows of old colonialism, the resistance of the post-colonial struggle of maintaining the native originality on the one hand obsessional hand washing of the old tyranny on the other, the agony of the exile, the longings of diasporic looking back into once own native past, the emotional trauma of being a witness to the structure of one's own dream falling apart and, above all, the agony of one's being misunderstood by one's own kith and kin. The post-colonial milieu of the novel Things Fall Apart finds a poignant treatment by Booth James, in such a way that the readers feel the true spirit of the post-colonial ways of life. It is relevant to reproduce the observation of Booth James regarding the post-colonial shadows that cover the efficacy of the Nigerian progress and development ; With the six years of independence Nigeria was a cesspool of corruption. Public servants helped themselves freely to the nation's wealth … Elections were blatantly rigged… The national census was outrageously stage-managed; Judges and magistrates themselves were manipulated and corrupted by foreign business interest. 1 The literary construction of post-colonialism within the force of a novelistic discourse produces the necessity of fore grounding of the quests for identities, the voices of resistance and the conditioned mind of the subjugated swinging between it's innocent individual learning and the compulsive obligations of the social expectations. To set the thesis initially, it would be proper to quote the following conceptualizations of post colonial conditions by Homi Bhabha ; … a range of contemporary critical theories suggests that it is from those who have suffered the sentence of history, subjugation, domination, diaspora, displacement-that we learn our most enduring lessons for living and thinking. There is even a growing conviction that the affective experience of social marginality… transforms our critical strategies. 2 Achebe views the novel as an exercise in self discovery. It is through writing, he believes, that an African can determine and establish his identity by exploring and rediscovering his roots. This reflexing and self defining nature of the novel is singularly important to post-colonial writers who have been confronting an erosion of their traditional values owing to the overpowering exposure to European culture which has already made insidious advances upon the native way of life and local customs, modes and habits in many countries. Things Fall Apart is a typical Igloo novel which describes Okonkwo's rise and fall. He was well known throughout the 'nine villages and even beyond.' 3 (p.3) His greatest achievement at the age of eighteen was 'throwing Amalinze the Cat.' Amalinze, the great Wrestler was called the cat because his back would never touch the earth. But Okonkwo threw the cat at last. It was said that Okonkwo never used his words, when he was angry he used his fists instead. His father Unoka owed every neighbor some money, from a few cowries to quite substantial amounts. In the first part of the novel various ceremonies of the triables are narrated. From the very beginning of the first part, Okonkwo's place in the Iglo society is highlighted. It is Okonkwo's will, determination and boldness which take him to the rank of one of the lords of the clan. He is a prosperous man, one who is acclaimed by the nine villages as a great warrior. In one year the harvest was unsatisfactory A farmer committed suicide in Okonkwo's village but Okonkwo tried not to lose his head. His
A Postcolonial analysis of Chinua Achebe's A man of the People
A postcolonial analysis of Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People, 2020
This paper was a postcolonial analysis of Chinua Achebe's novel, A Man of the People. The paper was of the argument that there is a need to look into various texts from a postcolonial perspective in order to unveil that which is concealed so as to provide a means of resisting the coloniser for the colonised. Postcolonial literature is key in understanding the coloniser and the colonised in aspects, such as politics, culture and education among others. From this analysis, it was concluded that Achebe's novel, A Man of the People is an element of postcolonial literature on its own as it is representative of contrasts of political, social, economic, cultural and moral aspects.