Realizing the Sacred: Power and Meaning in Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God
2003; Indiana University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2979/ral.2003.34.3.46
ISSN1527-2044
Autores Tópico(s)African cultural and philosophical studies
ResumoLike nationalist discourses, African literary criticism revolves around the question of authenticity. The distinctiveness of the African text and its distance from or subversion of European literary forms constitutes, it seems, its authentic quality. Thus, the "Africanness" of the African text is elaborated and celebrated through positing its appropriation of, on the one hand, the oral tradition, both in terms of form and content, and on the other, myth and ritual. Within African literary criticism, these considerations often provide the impetus for political judgments, prescriptive and proscriptive. This ideological move establishes the primacy of the political in the discipline. This is not surprising as African postcolonial cultural praxis has, from its beginning, allied itself in varied ways to the process of decolonization and social critique. The relation between the text and the world was pre-eminent. Writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Ayi Kwei Armah engaged with the extratextual world through different narrative strategies that were often oppositional and disjunctive. If we agree with Jonathan Culler that "the novel serves as the model by which society conceives of itself, the discourse through which it articulates the world" (189), then the African world presented to us was one rent by conflicts and contradictions: the scatological and the sublime, the demonic and the utopian, the mythical and the historical. Yet, at the same time it was also a world of profound unity. In both the "mythical" and "realist" writers, early postcolonial literary production aims towards a sense of totality—an idea of the interconnectedness of the African world.
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