Postcolonial Imaginations and Moral Representations in African Literature and Culture
By (author) Chielozona Eze
Not available to order
Publication date:
16 December 2011Length of book:
178 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9780739145081
The postcolonial African culture, as it is discoursed in the academia, is largely influenced by Africa’s response to colonialism. To the degree that it is a response, it is to considerably reactive, and lacks forceful moral incentives for social critical consciousness and nation-building. Quite on the contrary, it allows especially African political leaders to luxuriate in the delusions of moral rectitude, imploring, at will, the evil of imperialism as a buffer to their disregard of their people. This book acknowledges the social and psychological devastations of colonialism on the African world. It, however, argues that the totality of African intellectual response to colonialism and Western imperialism is equally, if not more, damaging to the African world. In what ways does the average African leader, indeed, the average African, judge and respond to his world? How does he conceive of his responsibility towards his community and society?
The most obvious impact of African response to colonialism is the implicit search for a pristine, innocent paradigms in, for instance, literary, philosophical, social, political and gender studies. This search has its own moral implication in the sense that it makes the taking of responsibility on individual and social level highly difficult. Focusing on the moral impact of responses to colonialism in Africa and the African Diaspora, this book analyzes the various manifestations of delusions of moral innocence that has held the African leadership from the onerous task of bearing responsibility for their countries; it argues that one of the ways to recast the African leaders’ responsibility towards Africa is to let go, on the one hand, the gaze of the West, and on the other, of the search for the innocent African experience and cultures.
Relying on the insights of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Wole Soyinka, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Achille Mbembe and Wolgang Welsch, this book suggests new approach to interpreting African experiences. It discusses select African works of fiction as a paradigm for new interpretations of African experiences.
The most obvious impact of African response to colonialism is the implicit search for a pristine, innocent paradigms in, for instance, literary, philosophical, social, political and gender studies. This search has its own moral implication in the sense that it makes the taking of responsibility on individual and social level highly difficult. Focusing on the moral impact of responses to colonialism in Africa and the African Diaspora, this book analyzes the various manifestations of delusions of moral innocence that has held the African leadership from the onerous task of bearing responsibility for their countries; it argues that one of the ways to recast the African leaders’ responsibility towards Africa is to let go, on the one hand, the gaze of the West, and on the other, of the search for the innocent African experience and cultures.
Relying on the insights of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Wole Soyinka, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Achille Mbembe and Wolgang Welsch, this book suggests new approach to interpreting African experiences. It discusses select African works of fiction as a paradigm for new interpretations of African experiences.
In Postcolonial Imagination and Moral Representations in African Literature and Culture, Chielozona Eze undertakes the ambitious task of charting a new philosophical pathway for African self-empowerment. The strength of his effort rests on two audaciously provocative interventions. The book’s rigorous analysis exposes the pitfalls of African cultural and literary discourses that thrive on the trope of victimhood and on the notion that morality and nobility are conferred by a history of foreign injury and oppression. Eze then posits a powerfully novel paradigm that moves African cultural discourses away from the politics and poetics of external culpability and blame and redirects them inward to scrutinize the possibilities and constraints of the African mind. Postcolonial Imagination provides a deft and lucid interrogation of an eclectic corpus of historical and contemporary texts, buttressing this analysis with an edifying rereading of familiar African classics from Achebe to Soyinka to Fanon. By summoning a vast repertoire of philosophical interpretation to complement his rich critique, Eze is able to craft a compelling argument for why any new projects of African cultural and political renaissance require a radical self-reflexivity that is missing from the existing African cultural, literary, and critical canons.