Humanism and Minority Literature: Toward a Definition of Counter-Hegemonic Discourse

Abstract

Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist and poet, claims that in the process of articulating the plight of their people, in depicting the trauma produced by colonial domination, and in the attempt to redefine the direction of indigenous cultures, African writers have inevitably involved themselves in a dialectical polemic with Western cultures: They have found themselves drawn irresistibly to writing about the fate of black people in a world progressively recreated by white men in their own image, to their glory and for their profit.' However, this accurate description of the predicament of African as well as other Third World writers and artists only defines a small, if important area of the problem. Those of us who take Achebe's comments seriously enough to reflect upon them are faced with an enormous task of defining that ambivalent dialectic. For while we may wish desperately to be culturally independent, we are attracted to and enthralled by Western society. Even if we bracket ithe issue of European-American economic and military domination, we are left with a difficult job of mapping our own ambivalences, of analyzing the manner in which Western culture infiltrates and dominates other cultures, and of defining the various actual and ideal responses of Third World people. We need to identify and analyze the modes of cultural hegemony as well as the institutions and practices that are used in this subjugating process-ranging from the destruction of tra-