1. Week 6 AFRICA WRITES BACK: POST-COLONIAL WRITING, MEMORY, AND AMNESIA

2. Key Issues To what extent was the post-colonial a break?
How did different authors propose to ‘decolonize the mind’?
What is African literature? Can it be written only by Africans about Africa? Can it be by those in the diaspora about Africa? Can it be by Africans about the diaspora? Can it be by those in the diaspora about the diaspora’s relations with Africa?
Should post-colonial literature be characterized always as tragedy?

3. Outline
Setting the Scene, Constructing a post-colonial identity – George Padmore, Stuart Hall, Frantz Fanon
Increasing the volume: building a black voice of resistance,
Independence fostering a nationalist intellectual movement: proposing new political philosophies
African literature: Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Wole Soyinka
Post-colonial?
As rupture?
Anti-colonial/decolonizing the mind
The arc of the tragic

4. Setting the scene, constructing a post-colonial identity
George Padmore and Ghana as a new day
Gold Coast independence is critical for ‘the entire future of Africa and the black race in America. Brazil and the West Indies have their eyes upon Ghana as the beacon light guiding an oppressed and exploited race out of the darkness of imperialism into the light of Freedom.’

5. Stuart Hall
‘What they felt was I have no voice, I have no history, I have come from a place to which I cannot go back and I have never seen. I used to speak a language which I can no longer speak, I had ancestors whom I cannot find, they worshipped gods whose names I do not know. Against this sense of profound rupture, the metaphors of a new kind of imposed religion can be reworked, can become a language in which a certain kind of history is retold, in which aspirations of liberation and freedom can be for the first time expressed, in which what I would call the imagined community of Africans can be symbolically reconstructed.’

6. Increasing the volume: building a black voice of resistance, 1930-1960
Invasion of Ethiopia,
Caribbean labour riots,
Pan-African Congress 1945
Mau Mau Rebellion
Ghana’s Independence 1957

7. Frantz Fanon
Fanon integral to our understanding of internal traumas of identity assoc with colonization
He provoked discussion about fact that colonization also about ways colonized subjects internally involved in objectification of self produced by colonizer. Thus ‘the search for independence and the struggle for decol…had to be premised on new identities.’
Conclusion to The Wretched Earth as the call to break from Europe.

8. Independence fostering a nationalist intellectual movement: proposing new political philosophies
Julius Nyerere
His theory was based on an interactive development as part of larger political dialogue among elements of Tanzanian society.
Ujamaa (KiSwahili for ‘family’)
socialism is ‘an attitude of mind’
“The basic difference between a socialist society
and a capitalist society does not lie in their
methods of producing wealth, but in the way that
wealth is distributed.”
The Arusha Declaration (1967)

9. African literature—Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Soyinka
Central characteristics:
literature’s close relationship with morality, author as conscience of society
strong sense of community, common humanity.
mysticism and supernatural
alternative vision of justice from Western/colonial order
central/mystical relationship to land
reinvigoration of African folklore
element of strong orality in their literature. Centrality of storyteller figure.
cyclical view of time

10. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958)
W. Soyinka, The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (1972)
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Detained: A writer’s prison diary (1981)

11. Post-colonial as rupture?
Linda Hutcheon has stated that in the postcolonial: ‘On the one hand, post is taken to mean “after,” “because of,” and even unavoidably “inclusive of” the colonial; on the other, it signifies more explicit resistance and opposition, the anticolonial’Temporality
David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity – postcolonial theory as the arc of tragedy vs. romance.
Neil Lazarus – commitment to something stronger than despair