The Movement of Specificity

PMLA ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 128 (3) ◽  
pp. 668-674 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nirvana Tanoukhi
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Camara Laye ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
Young Writer ◽  
Kinky Hair

If you want to know about Africa, read our literature—and not just Things Fall Apart.—Chris AbaniChimamandaadichie summarizes the current dilemma of the peripheral writer in thetitle of her recent ted talk: “The danger of a Single Story.” The talk's masterly braiding of ethos, pathos, and humor epitomizes the winning formula of this distinctively metropolitan media genre. But Adichie's rhetorical ingenuity interests us not as a cultural spectacle—the scene of a young African writer's anointment by metropolitan brokers as an upcoming “world writer”—but for what it structurally illuminates about the kind of minoritarian literary consciousness that gave birth to the concept of world literature. The speech begins by taking the audience down a well-trodden path, the story of Adichie's beginnings as a young writer in Nigeria—specifically, the naïveté of her childhood compositions: “All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out.” How deluded and childish it now seemed to Adichie, this business of putting cloudy skies and sumptuous apples in an African story. Luckily, African novelists like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye already existed to dispel her original disorientation, so that she learned to replace the landscapes of British and American fiction with familiar settings where “people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature.”

What Rough Beast: Neo-African Literature and the Force of Social Change

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 53-59
Author(s):  
William Cook
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
William Butler Yeats ◽  
African Literature ◽  
New Age ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
The World ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
Second Coming

The Second ComingTurning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 5The ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 10The Second Comingl Hardly are those words outWhen a vast image out of Spiritus MundiTroubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desertA shape with lion body and the head of a man,A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 15Is moving its slow thighs, while all about itReel shadows of the indignant desert birds.The darkness drops again; but I knowThat twenty centuries of stony sleepWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 20And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?William Butler YeatsChinua Achebe in 1959 turned to the above poem by Yeats, with its prophecy of the approach of a new age, for the title to his first novel. Ezekiel Mphalhlele in the same year chose lines seven and eight of the same powm as the epigraph to his autobiographical Down Second Avenue. This convergence upon one of the most foreboding images in modern poetry is not an accident. Both writers saw their own experiences of loss of order and future debilitation confirmed within the lines of Yeat’s apocalyptic poem. Viewed within the context of Yeats’ theory of 2000-year gyres, this vision becomes even more ominous.

scholarly journals REPRESENTASI KOLONISASI TERHADAP MASYARAKAT KULIT HITAM AFRIKA DALAM NOVEL THINGS FALL APART KARYA CHINUA ACHEBE

HUMANIKA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
. Hadiyanto
Keyword(s):  
Traditional Culture ◽  
Cultural Imperialism ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Social Disintegration ◽  
African Black ◽  
Colonial Theory ◽  
Tribal Society ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
Colonial Government

Abstract This article discusses white-skinned race colonization and its impacts on African black-skinned race tribal society and culture in African Anglophone novel Things Fall Apart written by Chinua Achebe. The approach used in this research is post-colonial approach by using post-colonial theory to analyze phenomena as well as the implication of the colonizer and the colonized relationship. The result of this research indicates that the coming of white-skinned race colonialists in African Ibo tribe community with their colonization and cultural imperialism is implemented with varied strategies. Those strategies are proven effectively in strengthening white-skinned race’s colonial hegemony in Africa. The white-skinned race colonialists’ imperialism results in horizontal conflict and cultural-social disintegration in African native society; between the pro-colonial and the anti-colonial. Anti-colonial resistence is shown by most African native society to fight against colonial government arrogance and to resist white-skinned race imperialism in Africa. Keywords: African black-skinned race traditional culture, white-skinned race colonization, horizontal conflict, social-cultural disintegration

Comparative Postcolonialisms: Storytelling and Community in Sholem Aleichem and Chinua Achebe

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ato Quayson
Keyword(s):  
First Person ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
The One ◽  
Central Characters ◽  
The Third Person

This paper compares Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman and Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God. Despite all their obvious differences in terms of cultural traditions and historical moments, the two authors’ fundamental commitment to modes of storytelling allows us to draw parallels and counterpoints between them. In both works storytelling is shaped by the essential polysemy of orality (such as the collocation of proverbs, gnomic statements, and anecdotes as crucial aspects of the stories being told), as well as an orientation toward ritual (in terms of the formal repetition of storytelling motifs and devices). In the Tevye stories, the first-person narration is addressed to various explicit and implied addressees and gives the impression of an immediate orality, whereas in Arrow of God the third-person narrator is coextensive with the one we encounter in Things Fall Apart in its quasi-ethnographic orientation. In both texts, storytelling and orality are mediums for identifying with an imagined community. Imagined implies a nonideal relationship to existing communities, something that is made clear in the agonistic infrastructure of the two central characters’ minds. The paper argues for seeing this agonistic infrastructure as a form of “contexture,” that is to say, a way to provide texture to the historical contexts in which they were written and to which their referential relays point us to.

Corpse Narratives and the Teleology of World Literary History

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-79
Author(s):  
Héctor Hoyos
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Critical Practice ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Latin American Fiction

The present essay proposes an orientation towards the corpse as a viable telos for the present-day revival of World Literature as critical paradigm. The argument has three parts. First, it characterizes two central tenets of the existing paradigm: a profession of dynamism for its own sake and an implicit lack of finality. Drawing on Kristeva and on examples from contemporary Latin American fiction, especially Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, the article then introduces corpse narratives that embrace the abject and reorient critical practice towards materiality. Finally, the conclusions propose a modest agenda for a different “worldliteraturism” that valorizes abject materiality over high-minded idealism.

scholarly journals Re-Reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Postcolonial Perspective

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.K.M. Aminur Rashid
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Igbo People ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
The Individual ◽  
To Receive

Being a postcolonial narrative, Things Fall Apart experiences a wide critical acclaim. From the pen of Chinua Achebe, the Igbo cultural complexity has come into being a theme that opens up a historical account of the clash of two cultures. Okonkwo, a very well-known public figure in his community falls under the threat of a new culture brought by the white missionaries preaching the gospels of the Christianity. After the arrival of the Christian culture, the first collision that takes place is the division at the individual, and then at the societal levels. When a number of the Igbo people, including Okonkwo’s son, change their religion, it creates chaos and confusions throughout the community. Although the Igbo people have a well-established way of life, the Europeans do not understand. That is why they show no respect to the cultural practices of the Igbo people. What Achebe delivers in the novel is that Africans are not savages and their societies are not mindless. The things fall apart because Okonkwo fails at the end to take his people back to the culture they all shared once. The sentiments the whites show to the blacks regarding the Christianity clearly recap the slave treatment the blacks were used to receive from the whites in the past. Achebe shows that the picture of the Africans portrayed in literature and histories are not real, but the picture was seen through the eyes of the Europeans. Consequently, Okonkwo hangs himself when he finds his established rules and orders are completely exiled by his own people and when he sees Igbo looses its honor by falling apart.

scholarly journals Rotaciones y traslaciones en la narrativa de Enrique Jaramillo Levi

LETRAS ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 129-145
Author(s):  
Fernando Burgos
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Central American ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The One

Este ensayo examina el concepto de metaficción en los cuentos de Enrique Jaramillo Levi. Se comienza por una explicación de los orígenes de la metaficción en la literatura universal así como de su establecimiento más sólido en el contexto de la narrativa moderna de la literatura escrita en lengua española. Se desarrolla luego la aplicación particular de lo metaficticio en la obra cuentística de Jaramillo Levi dejando claramente establecido que en su caso se trata de un estilo posmoderno cuya plasmación difiere del uso encontrado en la modernidad artística hispana. Finalmente en el análisis de un conjunto específico de cuentos del autor panameño se discute la manera como esas particulares técnicas posmodernas demuestran la función plural de lo metaficcional, contribuyendo así a la riqueza estética de la narrativa de Jaramillo Levi y, por ende, de la centroamericana. This essay scrutinizes the concept of metafiction in Enrique Jaramillo Levi’s short stories. The article starts with an explanation regarding the genesis of metafiction in world literature as well as its more solid establishment in the context of modern literature written in Spanish. It continues with the particular uses of metafictional discourse in Jaramillo Levi’s short stories by asserting that in his work there is a clear postmodern use whose literary rendition diverges from the one depicted by the works produced during Spanish artistic modernity. Finally, there is a discussion of specific short stories written by Jaramillo Levi, intended to show how those particular postmodern techniques point to the plural functionality of the metafictional mode, thus contributing to the aesthetic qualities of Jaramillo Levi’s narrative as well as to those of Central American fiction.

scholarly journals The True Face of Pre-Colonial Africa in “Things Fall Apart”

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (30) ◽  
pp. 96-104
Author(s):  
Ecevit Bekler
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Western World ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
Important Place ◽  
History Of ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
Authentic Environment ◽  
African Writers ◽  
The One

The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe is known to be one of the most influential African writers and holds an important place in postcolonial studies. His main aim was to reconstructthe wrongly established beliefs, ideas, and thoughts of the Western world regarding Africa. To realize his aim, he made careful selections in his choice of language, which contributed greatly to sharing his observations, ideas, and beliefs with the rest of the world. He wrote his novels in English, believing that doing so would be more powerful in conveying the true face of pre-colonial Africa, rather than in Nigerian, which could not be as effective as the language of the colonizers. Achebe’s complaint was that the history of Africa had mainly been written by white men who did not belong to his continent and who would not judge life there fairly. With his novels, he changed the prejudices of those who had never been to Africa, and he managed to convert the negative ideas and feelings caused by the portrayal of his continent to positive ones. Things Fall Apart is a novel whose mission is to portray Africa in a very realistic and authentic environment, contrary to the one-sided point of view of the colonizers. The novel presents us, in very authentic language, with many details about the customs, rituals, daily life practices, ceremonies, beliefs, and even jokes of the African Igbos. Chinua Achebe thus realizes his aim in revealing that African tribes, although regarded as having a primitive life and being very far from civilization, in fact had their own life with traditions and a culture specific to themselves.

scholarly journals Le problème de l’identité culturelle dans les romans Tout s’effondre de Chinua Achebe et Un nom pour un autre de Jhumpa Lahiri

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
pp. 243-260
Author(s):  
Nadejda Ivanova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
The Self ◽  
Close Connection ◽  
Cultural Conflict ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
Native Community ◽  
Jhumpa Lahiri ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
The Human Condition

The novels Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri approach an acute and sensitive problem of the effects of colonization and of the self-exiled emigrant man. Each of the protagonists of these two novels expresses an upheaval, an inner cultural conflict. It turns out that their destiny is in a close connection with their images and emotional valences, strongly fed by a collective imaginary, by the deep reality of collective life. Thus, adherence and communication with the archetypal resources of the native community, with the essential that precedes the human condition, proves to be a vital necessity, of overwhelming importance for our protagonists.

scholarly journals Lexical Gaps and Ideological Shift in the Translation of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as “Le Monde S’effondrein French”

2020 ◽  
pp. 283-297
Author(s):  
Angelinus Kwame Negedu
Keyword(s):  
French Language ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Chinua Achebe ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English Reader ◽  
Original Title ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
Ideological Divergence

In translating Chinua Achebe‟s Things Fall Apart, Michel Ligny translates directly Igbo terminologies, realities and beliefs into the French language. This has contributed greatly in the preservation of the beauty and authenticity of the original text. However, the title of the novel is domesticated by Michel Ligny to present a different ideology. Within the framework of Lawrence Venuti (2004) theory of domestication and foreignization of translation, this paper examines the ideological divergence between the title of the original text and the title of the translation. The paper concludes that the ideology that the translated title projects to the French-reader is totally different from the ideology that the original title projects to the English-reader.

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