The African Imagination: Postcolonial Studies, Canons, and Stigmatization

In the prefatory remarks to his new book, The African Imagination, Abiola Irele traces the trajectory of his professional career from his initial location in Africa to his present base in an American university. The Africa phase of his career, he emphasizes, was marked by an awareness that he was involved in the definition and mapping of a distinctive terrain of imaginative expression and a new academic field known as African literature within the context of a local community of scholars and students mutually engaged in a cultural activity that they felt was central to the needs of an evolving national community. In relocating to the center of the Western academy in the United States, he continues, he now pursues his professional career in an environment within which this literature is marginal. Indeed, the literature is not only marginal, it is more often secondary, serving only to provide validating material for other disciplines and/or evidence for consolidating the paradigms of dominant discourses or epistemologies.

This simple narrative, familiar enough to African academics, seems to me to acquire a massive significance when we turn to the essays in this book. As we go through them, it is difficult to avoid the feeling that the essays collected here are animated by a certain passion of engagement that arises from a striving to reactivate or recapture the intellectual investment and commitment that accorded meaning and relevance to the earlier Africa phase of his professional life. Difference in location usually translates to a change in perspective, an adjustment in the direction of professional practice, critical, and research agenda that has significant implications for the African literary scholarship and pedagogy. And this has become even more worrying now that sizeable numbers of African academics write from their locations in universities in the West. Again, Irele very gingerly describes the implications of this change in his preface. "This book," he says, "will probably be ranged under the rubric of 'postcolonial studies,' but I hope this convenient label will not obscure its wider connections" (xiv). This cautious hope has often been frustrated at even turn by the "interpretive communities" and criteria associated with the canonization of African literary texts under the rubric of postcolonial studies. There is no better place to demonstrate this than in the critical history of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and it is against this background that Irele's reading of this novel in this book becomes immensely significant for the direction of African literary theory and criticism.

At the heart of The African Imagination is the essay entitled "The Crisis of Cultural Memory in Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart." Certainly more than any other text, this novel has come to be the seen as central to the evolving canon of African literature and, lately, of postcolonial literatures. Indeed, the innumerable critical essays on this novel and its ubiquitous presence in the curricula of different academic departments all over the world is evidence that with this novel, what we are dealing with is the phenomenon that Jonathan Arac describes as "hypercanonization" (778). Apart from simply being a literary text, it is made to bear the burden of providing documentary evidence for anthropological studies and sociological speculations, corralled to perform other functions in histories of colonialism and decolonization and, in general, being made the representative text of the African response to European colonialism and modernity. Being overburdened with so large a freight of functions and thus critically reconstituted as the representative countercanonical text results in an "unarticulated stigmatization" that, in this case, often delegitimizes other avenues of inquiry beyond those consecrated in the counterdiscursive agenda. According to Saleh D. Hassan:

This stigmatization operates in a number of ways, but it is always associated with the history of political contestation that adheres to those "subversive" texts, which were used to redefine the parameters of the English literary canon. The most common feature of this stigmatization is...