History as project and source in Achebe's Things Fall Apart

Abstract

This article addresses the narrative and formal strategies by which Chinua Achebe's seminal Things Fall Apart generates historiographic knowledge. The novel is multi-discursive, which means that it takes stock of, and performs, the various sources that constitute what we call history and historical knowledge. The essay's force and novelty stem from its focused and sustained attention to the anatomy of the novel as the source of its engagement with its own historicity. All the histories, texts, and experiences congregate in the form of Achebe's Things Fall Apart, including the variety of colonial representations, Ibo oral literatures, and Western literary referents, among others. Moreover, the truism that Okonkwo ‘represents’ the Ibo also comes under critical pressure when one considers the archival work Achebe accomplishes, its commitment to illuminating the panorama of Ibo social experience. Things Fall Apart demonstrates to its readers—and especially non-Western readers—that they need not stand inside (or possess intimate knowledge of) African historical experience in order to access the novel. In a broader social context, Things Fall Apart has potent pedagogical qualities. It is an effective tool for rethinking disciplinary and canonical boundaries.