Against the Grain: Reading Achebe

Chinua Achebe, the ‘grand old man’ of African letters, has often been regarded as a champion of traditional African culture “writing back” to colonial discourses originating in Europe. This notion is not totally untrue (particularly with regard to his earlier work), but unduly simplifies the complex literary agenda that Achebe followed throughout his decade-long writing career. If he wrote against the colonial grain in his early novels, he changed tack in his later work and critically addressed the inequities and absurdities of Nigerian society after independence. But Achebe not only wrote against the grain; his works also need to be read against the grain to tease out subtleties and contradictions and to understand the intimate relations between literary form and changing political agendas in his fiction. Topics to be explored in this seminar include the role and representation of women, the role of the writer/intellectual in Achebe’s fictional world, faction and the politics of unreliable narration, entanglements of oral and scribal culture as well as forms and functions of ‘standard’ and ‘pidgin’ English.