Chinua Achebe’s Beautiful Soul”
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 13015334 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alexander Adkins (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 4 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 398-408 |
| Publication date | 2017-08-30 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2052-2614 • E-ISSN: 2052-2622 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/pli.2017.30 |
| OpenAlex | W2752737802 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 14 |
This essay revisits Chinua Achebe’s exemplary satire of African disillusionment, No Longer at Ease (1960). Published the year of Nigeria’s official independence from Britain, the novel describes how Obi Okonkwo, a civil servant and colonial subject, tries but fails at the threshold of independence to navigate a Nigerian modernity overrun with cultures of bribery, nepotism, and tribalism. Torn between the moral and financial demands of his rural, traditionalist kin and those of the colony’s urban elite, Obi succumbs to corruption, voicing his downfall and Nigeria’s botched independence through a sardonic self-acquittal. A frustrated idealist betrayed by the high promises of anticolonialism, Obi mirrors a lost generation of African writers and intellectuals, figures the novel satirizes for their self-absolving cynicism
Art · Colonialism · Cynicism · Elite · Independence (probability theory · Language change · Literature · Modernity · Nepotism · Political science · Politics · Servant · Sociology · Soul · Theology · Tribalism · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Law · Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
Ecology without Nature
A Critical Reading of the Disillusionment Novel
The Dissimulation of Race
Chinua Achebe and the Question of Modern African Tragedy
Chinua Achebe and the Uptakes of African Slaveries
Self-Writing and Existential Alienation in African Literature
The Paddle That Speaks English
On the Postcolony
Critique of cynical reason
Phenomenology of Spirit
Crap on the map, or postcolonial waste
Hometown' Voluntary Associations, Local Development, and the Emergence of Civil Society in Western Nigeria
| Citations per year | 0.17 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2020 - 2020 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |