Teleology and Secular Time in Armah and Ngũgĩ
Augustine, Manicheanism, and the African Novel
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9251017 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stephen Ney Stephen Ney, Stephen Ney (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 37 |
| Publication date | 2017-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Research in African Literatures (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0034-5210 • E-ISSN: 1527-2044 |
| Publisher | Indiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2979/reseafrilite.48.2.04 |
| OpenAlex | W2656689733 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 10 |
Modern secularity is sometimes taken to require an understanding of time as shapeless and open-ended. In contrast, Armah's novel Two Thousand Seasons and Ngũgĩ's novel Matigari deploy a temporality that steers the reader's attention to a certain deliverance in the future. Rather than taking this teleology as the rejection of secularity, I propose a notion of secularity derived from the North African Aurelius Augustine's fourth-century The City of God. Like these two novels, Augustine's work was disparaged as "manichean" because it seems to deny human freedom by dividing up individuals, institutions, and eras too starkly. However, Augustine's dualism complements a notion of the saeculum—the current age—as a time of intractable mixedness. In embracing key aspects of manicheanism without its morally exclusivist and politically separatist vision of the present, Augustine anticipates and illuminates the interventions by Armah and Ngũgĩ into the problem of postcolonial time
Art · Dualism · Epistemology · Literature · Secularity · Teleology · Temporality · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Islamic Studies and History · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies
African literature today
A Companion to Augustine
Black Skin, White Masks
Futures Past
Christianity and the Secular
The Wretched of the Earth
The Eschatology of Manichaeism as a Coherent Doctrine
Jerusalem and Babylon. A Study into Augustine's "City of God" and the Sources of His Doctrine of the Two Cities
World against Globe
Christianity and Public Culture in Africa
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |