Never Kill a Man Who Says Nothing: <i>Things Fall Apart</i> and the Spoken Worlds of African Fiction

Authors

  • Mrinalini Chakravorty University of Virginia

Keywords:

Achebe, orality, Igbo, orature, Things Fall Apart, violence, gender, postcolonial, colonial

Abstract

Can the novel rendering as it does imaginative worlds in written prose ever adequately capture the expressive oral dimensions of Africa’s lived cultures?  What violence is incurred in the transcription of oral socialities into written imaginaries?  This article reads Chinua Achebe’s iconic novel Things Fall Apart to argue that the most powerful aspect of Achebe’s prose takes the form of orature that unravels ideas about a monolithic African orality opposing itself to a unitary colonial script.   Advancing a theory about orature’s exceptional framing for the African novel, the essay argues that Achebe’s prose resonates with the presence of alternative oralities, including gendered oralities, that resist appropriation by a masculinist voice for representing subaltern Africa, or by the racially inscribed imperatives of colonial literacy.

Author Biography

Mrinalini Chakravorty, University of Virginia

Mrinalini Chakravorty is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Virginia. Her research and teaching interests lie in the intersections of postcolonial literature and film, critical theory, and gender and sexuality studies. Her forthcoming book, In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary (Columbia University Press) interrogates links among political, sexual, and cultural stereotypes of postcolonial representations of South Asia. Her previous and forthcoming articles include work on transnationalism, Arab women writers, interdisciplinarity, Indian cinema, and the politics of queer visibility in such journals as differences, Framework, Modern Fiction Studies, and PMLA.

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Published

2013-03-08