MJC Echeruo: Occidentalism, Diaspora, Nationalist, and Transnationalist Trajectories of His African Modernism

Michael Chukwudalu Echeruo’s trajectories are broad and complex: poet, literary critic, and scholar, Echeruo is quite easily one of the most vital and one of the most accomplished of modern African literary theorists and practitioners. As a poet, Echeruo’s style is considered difficult and arcane, and it left most critics of modern African poetry, like Chinweizu, Madubuike, and Jemie, very distraught with what they discerned as “Hopkins disease.” His critical scholarship, far ranging and varied, moved from a very occidentalist sensibility to its final mooring in the Africa and the African diaspora, with which he has engaged in some of its most original and archival scholarship. This essay attempts to place Echeruo, whose intimidating work has the quality of grandeur, within the specific tradition of an African modernity. It also places in context the linkages that clarify the critical tensions within Echeruo’s artistic and critical production as a modernist thinker.