Christopher Okigbo and the Postcolonial Market of Memories

Bibliographic Data

ID9250385
AuthorsMaik Nwosu (corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume38
Issue4
Pages70-86
Publication date2007-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueResearch in African Literatures (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0034-5210 • E-ISSN: 1527-2044
PublisherIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/ral.2007.38.4.70
OpenAlexW1973073504
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited10

The association of Christopher Okigbo's poetry with Anglo-American modernist poetics has often attracted two main types of evaluation: the failure of ideology and Eurocentrism. But Okigbo demonstrates literary dexterity in the manner in which the deep structure of his poetry troubles the historical overvaluation of the white sign and the devaluation of the black sign manifest in the colonial market of memories between Europe and Africa. Historical dialogism or a postcolonial market of memories—involving the invocation of both the local and the foreign, the specific and the universal—is a strategic feature of Okigbo's poetry. He ultimately creates a third signifying field via a conjunction of two signifying systems, the native and the colonial, into a new state of consciousness rooted in a traditional African mythic code

Aesthetics · Art · Colonialism · Consciousness · Epistemology · Eurocentrism · Field (mathematics) · Ideology · Linguistics · Literature · Poetics · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Sign (mathematics) · Sociology · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · Anthropology · History · Law · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South African History and Culture

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