Protocols of Representation and the Problems of Constituting an African 'Gnosis': Achebe and Okri

Abstract

From the publication of Edward W. Said's Orientalism, which could be taken as the inaugural text of postcolonial theory, postcolonial studies have been dominated by a shift from the analysis of the material specificities of colonialism to a detailing of the discourses and ideas produced by the colonial encounter. As Stephen Slemon notes in his analysis of the dominant configurations in postcolonial theory, the nature of colonialism as an economic and political structure of domination, though carefully examined, is not the level at which the question of European colonialism really troubles postcolonial fields of study. Rather, it is with the concept of colonialism 'as an ideological or discursive formation [...] as an apparatus for constituting subject positions through the field of representation' that the field is mostly concerned. What remains to be added to Slemon's formulation, however, is that these concerns with representation, and its material effects as they relate to the past and continuing relations between the West and its former colonies, parallel conceptual shifts within Western theory itself. Fredric Jameson's characterization of the critical options available to students of culture offers a useful glimpse into the nature of the shifts that have taken place in Western cultural theory in this century. Defining his project in the preface to The Political Unconscious, Jameson outlines on the very first page what he sees as the two main choices that confront the student of culture. On the one hand, there is the choice of the study of the nature of objective structures of a given cultural text, 'the historicity of its manifest forms and content and the situational background of its linguistic and aesthetic dimensions'; on the other, there is the choice of a focus on the 'interpretive categories or codes through which we read and receive the text in question'.2 WhatJameson defines as the key modes of cultural analysis encapsulate the general shifts that have taken place in the social sciences and the humanities. There has been a general move in both areas of scholarly