Abstract
The 2008 African Literature Association annual meeting at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois, featured a three-day panel, the centerpiece of the conference, titled “Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart—Fifty Years Later.” The objective of the panel was to explore the ways this foundational novel still had currency. An affirmative answer was assumed because the novel challenges colonial representations of Africa by providing a complex and affirmative (though not Utopian) portrait of a particular African culture. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise (1994), shortlisted for the Booker Prize, examines the nature of the precolony on the Swahili coast much in the same way that Things Fall Apart portrays precolonial Ibo society. Gurnah’s Paradise, however, calls into question the very possibility of a “precolonial” Africa, in the sense of an African civilization prior to contact with Europeans, non-Europeans, and other Africans. Thus the novel complicates the very designation “African,” which is why I have chosen to start this study with a discussion of it.
But for those who dread the majesty of their Lord shall be two gardens.
—Qur’an 55:46
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Notes
Ali Mazrui, The Africans: A Triple Heritage (Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1986), 89.
Susheila Nasta, “Paradise” In The Popular and the Canonical: Debating Twentieth Century Literature 1940–2000, ed. David Johnson (London: Routledge, 2005), 319.
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York: Anchor Books, 2008), 209.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Penguin Classics, 2007), 23–24.
J. Spencer Trimingham, Islam in East Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 57.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Paradise (London: Penguin, 1994), 6.
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 263.
See Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein’s Race, Class, and Nation: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991).
Jonathon Glassman, “Slower Than a Massacre: The Multiple Origins of Racial Thought in Colonial Africa,” American Historical Review 109, no. 3 (June 2004): 720–54.
See Harry Garuba’s essay “Race in Africa: Four Epigraphs and a Commentary,” PMLA 123, no. 5 (October 2008): 1640–48.
Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist literary Theory (London: NLB, 1976), 134.
Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” in Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Anchor Books, 1988). 1–20, 10.
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lehnart (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 274.
J. A. Kearney, “Abdulrazak Gurnah and the ‘Disabling Complexities of Parochial Realities,” English in Africa 33, no. 1 (May 2006): 47–58.
Jean and John Comaroff, “Africa Observed: Discourses of the Imperial Imagination,” in Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation, ed. Roy Richard Ginker and Christopher B. Steiner (Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1997), 693.
Amin Malak, Muslim Narratives and the Discourse of English (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 57.
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© 2011 Emad Mirmotahari
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Mirmotahari, E. (2011). Paradises Lost. In: Islam in the Eastern African Novel. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119291_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119291_2
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