Chinua Achebe: The Ironies of History Dancing with the Politics of Literature

Ekwueme Michael Thelwell discusses the influence of Chinua Achebe’s 1975 lecture through Stephen Clingman’s praise of it as “a remarkable moment both in literary criticism and in a broader cultural assessment of how Africa has been perceived and represented in the Western world. In making his case Achebe challenged the entire framework in which art would be judged and in which the discussion of Africa would be sustained.”