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2020 Things Fall Apart Introductory Lecture Slides
2020 Things Fall Apart Introductory Lecture Slides
Achebe
Dr. T. Tsehloane
Chinua Achebe
• Born in 1930, in a village called Ogidi in South Eastern Nigeria.
• In 1966 his work was interrupted by the Nigerian civil war, when
South Eastern region attempted to breakaway to form the
independent state of Biafra.
C. Achebe
• After the war, he was appointed as a Senior Research Fellow at
University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
• Later on he was appointed in several universities abroad.
• He has received numerous awards and honours throughout the world.
• He is a recipient of the Nigerian National Merit Award
• In 2007 he won Booker International Prize for Fiction
• He has written over twenty books: novels, short stories essays and
collections of poetry.
• He died on 21 March 2013 aged 82.
Famous Works
• Things Fall Apart (1958)
• No Longer at Ease (1960)
• Arrow of God (1964)
• A Man of the People (1966)
• Girls at War (1972)
• Anthills of the Savannah (1987)
Chinua Achebe
• Author’s first and most influential novel.
• Published 1958.
• It has sold over ten million copies.
• Has been translated into more than fifty languages.
• Breakdown of traditional African culture in face of European
colonisation in the late nineteenth century.
• It reflects on this important historical encounter from the point of
view of the Africans, the subjects of colonisation.
Challenging the Canon
• Achebe published Things Fall Apart as a response partly to what he
considered to be distortions and fabrications by Eurocentric novels, such as
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson that
treat Africa as a primordial and cultureless foil to Europe.
• As a text, Things Fall Apart is set in the 1890’s and portrays a precolonial
African society and its subsequent encounter with British colonialism. It
shatters the stereotypical notions about Africa and Africans.
• Achebe depicts a traditional African society as complex with advanced
social institutions and traditions prior to its contact with Europeans.
• He conveys a fuller understanding of African culture and thus giving voice
to an underrepresented and previously denigrated colonial subject.
Edward Said’s Orientalism
• Illustrates the manner in which the representations of Europe’s
Others has been institutionalised since the eighteenth century as a
feature of its cultural dominance.
• Europe associated itself with order, rationality and symmetry.
• Non-Europeans were seen as inferior and associated with disorder,
irrationality and primitivism.
• Myth, opinion, hearsay and prejudice assumed the status of received
truth.
Achebe as a writer
• Believed in the power of literature to create and initiate social
change.