Abstract
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s politics of language has been controversially received by his critics, who tend to either overemphasize his revolutionary trajectory as an African writer or devalue his efforts to produce an African language-based literature. Through a historical and cultural analysis, the present work offers an alternative view of Ngũgĩ’s treatment of the language question as a problematic, yet necessary, attempt to interrogate and alter his cultural alignments with European colonialism.
Highlights
The rift between Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s formal education and the familial and political contexts in which he was born and raised, as well as the literary impasses that ensued from his condition as an exiled constitute some of the main issues the writer has tried to negotiate in the course of his career1
For many of his critics, Ngũgĩ has succeeded in overcoming the colonialist bases of his European education, a change he himself has defined as an “epistemological break” with his past
I will argue that Ngũgĩs literary and political performance should be perceived in terms of a commitment to understand and interrogate the cultural alignments that constituted the very basis of his formal education – which comprises, his contact with the English language – as well as his problematic relationship with Western academic institutions
Summary
The rift between Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s formal education and the familial and political contexts in which he was born and raised, as well as the literary impasses that ensued from his condition as an exiled constitute some of the main issues the writer has tried to negotiate in the course of his career. I will argue that Ngũgĩs literary and political performance should be perceived in terms of a commitment to understand and interrogate the cultural alignments that constituted the very basis of his formal education – which comprises, his contact with the English language – as well as his problematic relationship with Western academic institutions This will hopefully reveal Ngũgĩ’s case as an important example of the blurred frontiers between commitment and complicity and of some of the possibilities of negotiation between the two with respect to the exiled intellectual.
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