Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 23 East African literature in English
- 24 Anglophone literature of Central Africa
- 25 West African literature in English: beginnings to the mid-seventies
- 26 South African literature in English
- 27 African literature in French: sub-Saharan Africa during the colonial period
- 28 North African literature in French
- 29 Francophone literatures of the Indian Ocean
- 30 African literature in Spanish
- 31 African literature in Portuguese
- 32 Popular literature in Africa
- 33 Caribbean literature in French: origins and development
- 34 Caribbean literature in Spanish
- 35 Anglophone Caribbean literature
- 36 The Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude movement
- 37 Postcolonial Caribbean identities
- 38 African literature and post-independence disillusionment
- 39 “Postcolonial” African and Caribbean literature
- 40 Modernism and Postmodernism in African literature
- Index
- References
40 - Modernism and Postmodernism in African literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
By
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 23 East African literature in English
- 24 Anglophone literature of Central Africa
- 25 West African literature in English: beginnings to the mid-seventies
- 26 South African literature in English
- 27 African literature in French: sub-Saharan Africa during the colonial period
- 28 North African literature in French
- 29 Francophone literatures of the Indian Ocean
- 30 African literature in Spanish
- 31 African literature in Portuguese
- 32 Popular literature in Africa
- 33 Caribbean literature in French: origins and development
- 34 Caribbean literature in Spanish
- 35 Anglophone Caribbean literature
- 36 The Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude movement
- 37 Postcolonial Caribbean identities
- 38 African literature and post-independence disillusionment
- 39 “Postcolonial” African and Caribbean literature
- 40 Modernism and Postmodernism in African literature
- Index
- References
Summary
It is not insignificant that Chinua Achebe, recognized as one of the world’s best contemporary novelists, gestures towards a Modernist sensibility in the title to his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958). This refers to a line from W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (1922), in which, writing via an apocalyptic lens, the Irish poet describes the historical disruptions that occur in the encounter between epochs:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Achebe’s novel also reflects upon this theme but from a thoroughly African and Igbo perspective in which all levels of the narrative discourse, from language use to characterization and the sense of spatiality, help establish the terrible effects of the colonial encounter. Another of his novels, No Longer at Ease (1961), also refers to a Modernist poem, this time T. S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” (1927). Eliot’s idea of being neither within nor outside the possibility of salvation, of being both of the old order and of the new, and the nagging sense of loss and alienation that this produces is translated by Achebe into a representation of the predicament of Obi Okonkwo, an educated African in early post-independence Nigeria caught between the mores and expectations of his traditional upbringing and the western forms of self-actualization sharpened by his travels in the west and by his sojourn in Lagos as a senior civil servant.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature , pp. 824 - 852Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
References
, and . 1999. Return to Childhood: The Memoir of a Modern Moroccan Woman. Austin: University of Texas Press.
, and . 1997. “Arabic Writing between Local and Global Culture: Scholars and Poets in Yorubaland.” Research in African Literatures 28: 3.Google Scholar
. [1975] 1986. “The Novelist as Teacher.” In Morning Yet on Creation Day. London: Heinemann.Google Scholar
, ed. 1982. The Arabic Novel: A Historical and Critical Introduction. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
1993. A Short History of Modern Arabic Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
. 1987. C’est le soleil qui m’a brûlée. Paris: Editions Stock.
. 1996. The Sun Hath Looked Down Upon Me. Trans. . London: Heinemann.
, and , eds. [1976] 1991. Modernism, 1890–1930. London: Penguin.
. 1998. Ibn Khaldun and the Medieval Maghreb. London: Ashgate.
. 1990. An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
. 1997. “A’jami Literature in Senegal: The Example of Sëriñ Mousaa Ka.” Research in African Literatures 28: 3.Google Scholar
. 1997. “The Time of History and the Times of Gods.” In The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital. Ed. and . Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
, and . 1980. Toward the Decolonization of African Literature. Enugu: Fourth Dimension.
. 1998. Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye. London: Routledge.
. 1975. La littérature algérienne contemporaine. Paris: Presses contemporaines de France.
. 1995. “Towards a Post-Africanism: Contemporary African Thought and Post-modernism.” Textual Practice 9. 1.Google Scholar
. 1993. Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning. London: Routledge.
. 1991. “Le centiéme roman tunisien: Zahrat al-Subbar (Fleur de cactus) de Alia Tabaï.” Institut des Belles Lettres Arabes 54 Tunis: IBLA.Google Scholar
. 1992. “Arabic-Language Tunisian Literature (1956–1990).” Research in African Literatures 23. 2.Google Scholar
. 1998. Recherches sur la littérature arabe. Institut des Belles Lettres Arabes 38. Tunis: IBLA.
. 1926. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Standard Edition 18. London: Hogarth.
. 1963. Arabic Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
1995. “Ben Okri’s Spirit-Child: Abiku Migration and Postmodernity.” Research in African Literatures 26.1.Google Scholar
. 1983. African Philosophy: Myth and Reality. Trans. and . London: Hutchinson.
. 1995. Arabic Literature of Africa, vol. II: The Writings of Central Sudanic Africa. Leiden: Brill.
. 1997. “The Arabic Literary Tradition of Nigeria.” Research in African Literatures 28. 3.Google Scholar
. 1998. Arabic Literature of Africa, vol. III: The Writings of the Muslim Peoples of Eastern Africa. Leiden: Brill.
. 2001. The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. [1981] 1990. The African Experience in Literature and Ideology. London: Heinemann. Rpt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
1983. Beyond a Boundary. London: Serpent’s Tail.
1993. “Popular Arts and Modern Society.” In American Civilization. Ed. and . Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
. 1984. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146.Google Scholar
. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso.
. 1988. Al-Naqd al-Adabi al-Hadith fi al-Maghrib [Modern Literary Criticism in the Maghreb]. Ifriqiya al-Sharq: Casablanca (in Arabic).
. 1999. Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
. 1987. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen.
, and , eds. 1998. Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, vols. I and II. London: Routledge.
. 1990. Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
. 1990. Journeys through the French African Novel. Oxford: James Currey; Portsmouth: Heinemann.
1988. The Invention of Africa. Oxford: James Currey; Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
1969. A Literary History of the Arabs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 1981. “Negritude: New and Old Perspectives.” In Tasks and Masks: Themes and Styles of African Literature. London: Longman.Google Scholar
1968. Shinqiti Folk Literature and Song. Oxford: Oxford Library of African Literature.
. 1994. The Dialect of Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
. 1972. Culture, Tradition and Society in the West African Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
. 1991. The Famished Road. London: Jonathan Cape.
. 1993. Songs of Enchantment. London: Vintage.
. 1995. “Esoteric Webwork as Nervous System: Reading the Fantastic in Ben Okri’s Writing.” In Essays on African Writing, vol. II. Ed. . London: Heinemann.Google Scholar
. 1997. Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing. Oxford: James Currey; Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
. 1965. The Interpreters. London: André Deutsch.
. 1978. Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
, ed. 1985. Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih: A Casebook. Beirut: American University of Beirut.
. 1996. Without a Name. Harare: Baobab.
. 1996. Al-Riwaya al-’Arabiyya al-Muritaniyya [The Mauritanian Arabic Novel]. Cairo: Al-Hay’a al-Masriyya al-’Amma lil-Kitaba (in Arabic).
, and , eds. 1995. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Durham: Duke University Press.