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Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies

1991

Discourse

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Chinua Achebe And The Post-Colonial Esthetic: Writing, Identity, And National Formation, Simon Gikandi Jan 1991

Chinua Achebe And The Post-Colonial Esthetic: Writing, Identity, And National Formation, Simon Gikandi

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Chinua Achebe is recognized as one of Africa's most important and influential writers, and his novels have focused on the ways in which the European tradition of the novel and African modes of expression relate to each other in both complementary and contesting ways. Achebe's novels are informed by an important theory of writing which tries to mediate the politics of the novel as a form of commentary on the emergence and transformation of nationalism which constitutes the African writer's epistemological context. Achebe's esthetic has been overdetermined by the changing discourse on representation and national identity in colonial and post-colonial …


Writing Double: Politics And The African Narrative Of French Expression, John D. Erickson Jan 1991

Writing Double: Politics And The African Narrative Of French Expression, John D. Erickson

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This essay studies two African narratives of French expression (Le Temps de Tamango of Boubacar Diop and L'Enfant de sable of Tahar ben Jelloun) to see how they create a discourse of difference that challenges and deconstructs the conventions of the discursive system of French, its signifying practices, and its ideological underpinnings. The tactics of these narratives, which mark them as post-colonial in a strict sense (as opposed to neo-colonial), are productive of a radical other-meaning, a new meaning that "speaks" to the concerns of and problems confronting the non-Western writer.