Excavating the New Republic

Post-colonial Subjectivity in Achebe's Things Fall Apart

Bibliographic Data

ID3330306
AuthorsChristopher Wise (0000-0001-9558-7112, Western Washington University, corresponding author)
Year1999
Volume22
Issue4
Pages1054-1070
Publication date1999-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCallaloo (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0161-2492 • E-ISSN: 1080-6512
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/cal.1999.0205
OpenAlexW1988194227
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited16

Excavating The New Republic: Post-colonial Subjectivity in Achebe's Things Fall Apart Christopher Wise (bio) "[I]t may be productive [today] to think in terms of a genuine transformation of being which takes place when the individual subject shifts from purely individual relations to that very different dynamic which is that of groups, collectives and communities . . . The transformation of being . . . is something that can be empirically experienced . . . by participation in group praxis-an experience no longer as rare as it was before the 1960s, but still rare enough to convey a genuine ontological shock, and the momentary restructuration and placing in a whole new perspective of the kinds of private anxieties that dominate the monadized existence of the individual subject" -Fredric Jameson "Interview" (82) Introduction After Frantz Fanon's and Aimé Césaire's devastating critiques of Placide Tempels' La philosophie bantoue in the mid-1950s, the hermeneutic and logocentric quest to recuperate the more overtly ontological dimensions of African culture became theoretically suspect, if not wholly untenable, following nearly three decades of speculation about Léopold Sédar Sénghor's négritude, which is now widely dismissed as an under-theorized metaphysics of blackness. 1 Today, Fanon's and Césaire's analyses of Tempels' book seem more viable than ever. In a recent study by Kwame Anthony Appiah, for example, we receive due warning about the dangers of overglorifying the otherness of pre-colonial African culture, especially for the sake of commodifying its art. Furthermore, Appiah demonstrates how contemporary African writers have tended to reject the Western mandate that they recreate or reify the lost alterity of their past; or, borrowing from Sara Suleri, Appiah argues that many African artists and intellectuals do not wish to serve as "otherness machines" for late capitalist, consumer society (157). Like Fanon and Césaire then, many contemporary post-colonial critics are concerned about recent efforts to commodify African being, especially for the sake of merely enriching the West's powerful university system, or its growing complex of art and ethnological museums. [End Page 1054] Additionally, as Fanon has observed in Black Skin, White Masks (1982), most purely academic celebrations of African ontology, as found in the work of Tempels, Leo Frobenius, and many others, tend to disregard the more pressing social and political needs of the present. Responding to Tempels' La philosophie bantoue, Fanon warns specifically that "[i]t is not a matter of finding Being in Bantu thought, when Bantu existence subsists at the level of nonbeing, of the imponderable" (185-86). Fanon goes on to dismiss efforts like Tempels' as "rubbish" [scandale] and his rejection is no less categorical than Césaire's, who in Discourse on Colonialism (1972) demonstrates even less sympathy with Tempels' work than Fanon (34-39). Césaire, in fact, characterizes Tempels' book as "slimy and fetid" [vaseuse et méphitique] (34), ironically ridiculing Tempels' generosity and missionary zeal (38). "Since Bantu thought is ontological," Césaire quips, "the Bantu only ask for the satisfaction of an ontological nature. Decent wages! Comfortable housing! Food!" (38-39). Given then the on-going and disproportionate distribution of the world's wealth, as well as more pedestrian problems in Africa like starvation, AIDS, and civil-war, first world scholars and teachers must never lose sight of the scandalous disjunction between their own privileged experience and the experience of oppressed Africans in places like Angola, Somalia, and the Sudan. To quote Ngugi wa Thiong'o, first world intellectuals must ceaselessly remind their constituency that the very water they drink is often "taken from the mouths of the thirsty," and the food they eat is "snatched from the mouths of the hungry" (Barrel of a Pen 74). In this sense, any purely abstract theorization of pre-colonial African being must stand condemned as worse than irrelevant: The harsh reality of contemporary existence in Africa would seem to dictate that immediate social and material demands must take precedence over speculatory efforts by scholars like Temples or Frobenius to reconstruct Africa's pre-colonial past. Another way of saying this might be to accept Fanon's argument that no true culture can come to life under such oppressive social conditions

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Colonialism · Epistemology · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Praxis · Sociology · Subject (documents · Subjectivity · African history and culture studies · Anthropology · History · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies