CONJUNCTURE, HYPERMASCULINITY AND DISAVOWAL IN THINGS FALL APART

Abstract

Discerning and eloquent critics have given us a vocabulary to describe the rhetorical achievement of Things Fall Apart. Distinguishing Achebe from other early anglophone African writers, critics locate his genius in his exploitation of the novel as a form for historicizing the Igbo past and writing ‘Africa’ into ‘world history’. Abiola Irele observes, for example, that Things Fall Apart provides ‘an image of an African society reconstituted as a living entity and in its historic circumstances, an image of a coherent social structure forming the institutional fabric of a universe of meaning and values’ (2001: 115). Simon Gikandi similarly underscores the novel's success in illustrating ‘a fundamental linkage between a mode of production, a system of beliefs and a kinship structure’ (1991: 29). These and other critical accounts attribute Achebe's status in the critical tradition as the founder of an anglophone canon of African writing to his provision of a materialist rationale for traditions hitherto unrecognized by an international audience as such. Surpassing the romanticism of Solomon Plaatje and the fabulism of Amos Tutuola, critics credit Achebe's Africanized realism with decisively addressing and refuting the European tradition of racist representation of the continent's peoples as ‘merely instinctual’ and, therefore, inhuman.