Chinua Achebe And The Igbo World View

Chinua Achebe and the Igbo-African World: Between Fiction, Fact, and Historical Representation explores Chinua Achebe’s literary works and how they communicated the Igbo-African world to readers. Engaging in the politics of representation, Achebe sought to demystify deterministic views of race and cultural ethnocentrism. While his books and commentaries have been very influential in shaping a unique and multifaceted view of the African world, some scholars have challenged Achebe’s representations of historical reality. Through in-depth analyses of his writing, contributors examine the interpretations Achebe imposed on African culture and history in his texts. The chapters cover Achebe’s engagement with critical issues like historical representation, gender relations, and indigenous political institutions in a changing society. Throughout, contributors present new ways for understanding Achebe's literary works and show how his work draws from African historical reality and identity while challenging Western epistemological hegemony.

“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.

This innovative book provides an original approach to the analysis of the representation of myth, ritual, and 'magic' in African literature. Emphasizing the ambivalent nature of the sacred, it advances work on the religious dimension of canonical African texts and attends to the persistence of pre-colonial cultures in postcolonial spaces.

Chinua Achebe examines Nigerian societies not only of different times but from many perspectives as well. This study concentrates on the differing world views (Weltbilder) in his texts; all the novels of the writer, his collections of essays, children books, short stories as well as poems are taken under scrutiny. In addition, the world view (Weltanschauung) of the writer is examined. Through it, Achebe's «message» for a better future is distilled.

This book examines how Chinua Achebe presented the Igbo-African world in his writing by analyzing his engagement with critical issues like historical representation, gender, and indigenous political institutions. Contributors study how his work draws from African historical reality and identity while challenging Western epistemological hegemony.

This compendium of 37 essays provides global perspectives of Achebe as an artist with a proper sense of history and an imaginative writer with an inviolable sense of cultural mission and political commitment.

From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart—a long-awaited memoir of coming of age in a fragile new nation, and its destruction in a tragic civil war For more than forty years, Chinua Achebe maintained a considered silence on the events of the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967–1970, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Decades in the making, There Was a Country is a towering account of one of modern Africa’s most disastrous events, from a writer whose words and courage left an enduring stamp on world literature. A marriage of history and memoir, vivid firsthand observation and decades of research and reflection, There Was a Country is a work whose wisdom and compassion remind us of Chinua Achebe’s place as one of the great literary and moral voices of our age.