Critiquing the Postcolonial Construct in Chinua Achebe’s Novels

Chinua Achebe's novels have always been read as texts from an erstwhile colonised African nation, interpreted within the parameters suggested by postcolonial theorists. The confines of postcolonial readings have raised questions about when the ‘postcolonial’ period would end, so that writers would no longer need to ‘write back’ to the empire or ‘rewrite’ their histories.

This work explores how Achebe’s novels articulate his knowledge of his own people and the manner in which he participates in the politics of representation. He critiques the postcolonial methodology, and seeks out, recovers and provides an alternative narrative of the postcolonial experience and its aftermath, even as he seems to be moving beyond it. Achebe’s narratives do not conform to the postcolonial constructs of history as telling (rather than recalling) and of nations in terms of states (rather than people). Achebe combines the techniques available to historians (documentation) with those of novelists (the imaginative re-creation of events) for his fictional evocation of the past. He emphasises both the African artists’ role in helping to create a more egalitarian society and that of the act of storytelling as a shaping force in people’s lives. As he negotiates between his narrative form and realistic subject matter, Achebe puts forward a powerful critique of colonisation and its aftermath. Achebe represents a canonical voice in the emerging discourse of writers struggling to break free from the clichéd world of anti-imperialism and decolonisation.